Vancouver made a giant bet on Oliver Ekman-Larsson bouncing back after some shaky seasons in the desert Edmonton followed suit with their bet on Keith. Let’s focus on the four Canadian defenders for a moment. But there is another side of that coin: that the teams were bad because the players earning the most minutes were routinely getting beat by the competition. It’s true that most of these defenders were playing on average or subpar teams and may have been disproportionately hit by the lack of talent around them. The below table shows each defender’s Goals Above Replacement percentile against his usage percentiles:Įvery one of these defenders played first-pairing minutes last year, and some of them – like Los Angeles’ Drew Doughty and Edmonton’s Duncan Keith – played more than just about anyone in the league. Three of the defenders were traded in major off-season deals. The most upside-down defenders are playing in Canadian markets next season. Most of these defencemen have hundreds of games played. The list is entirely comprised of defencemen. If you take a unit of measure (I’ll use the regression-based Goals Above Replacement measure here) and measure it against usage, you can see which players are upside down in their minutes. The opposite is also true there are a handful of players who see heavy utilization yet perform dismally in those minutes. The third-pairing types tend to be entering the league, exiting the league, or have a specialized skill set that allows them to play effectively in special-teams minutes.īut what happens when the system breaks? Front offices around the league are constantly looking for diamonds in the rough to buy low on – players who are productive in limited roles but haven’t been able to tap into extra ice time for any number of reasons. The first-pairing types tend to be all-around players, talented puck movers and impressive interior defenders. Players harder to differentiate from top-tier AHL talent tend to find themselves on a third pair with significantly less usage. The most productive defenders in the league are generally players coaches have on the first pair. Ice time assumes coaches are getting deployment right. It’s one of the reasons why you hear ice time – which has nothing to do with production, but rather a coach’s forecast of future production – referenced as a defining measure for defenders. Simple measures like rate scoring are fantastic production proxies for forwards, but not so much for defencemen. The relationship exists, I suspect, because defensive performance is much more difficult to quantify. If you are a defenceman? You might be able to hold on to those minutes for a very long time. If you are a high-scoring forward that enters a lengthy scoring slump, expect your minutes to aggressively taper. There is an interesting dichotomy between forwards, defencemen, and how NHL coaching staffs treat changes in performance.

Ekman facial expression