One tasty nugget to come out of The Athletic’s NHL Players Poll was the desire to see a split Norris Trophy award. Also, the sideswipe of Adam Fox had me chuckling, given that I’ve always thought he was just a fancier term for “Torey Krug,” BUT THAT’S NOT WHY YOU CALLED.
Anyway, Michael Russo got an overwhelming response from players that the Norris Trophy, the award for best defenseman in the league, has basically turned into handing it to whichever d-man put up the most points. Players seemed to think that actually playing defense wasn’t a factor in who won the award, with Fox and Erik Karlsson being mentioned as players who didn’t really put the “defense” in “defenseman.” Karlsson was straight-up called a forward by one of his NHL brethren.
Some responses lamented that there wasn’t really a way, or a stat, to properly judge a player like Jaccob Slavin, Carolina’s stalwart on the blue line, who some of these players personally attested to just how much hell he makes their lives. Ah, but that’s just lack of information and desire on their parts. Because sickos like us can find some metrics that do measure who is making the biggest difference in their own zone.
We can’t just use goals-against for d-men, because the noise of the goaltending behind them would skew those numbers. There could be a great blue-liner who is being let down by having a wavy-armed inflatable man behind him in his crease, and we wouldn’t see the work he was actually doing. Merely relegating it to attempts, or Corsi, would be a touch noisy too, because there are teams out there that have systems that are designed to give up a lot of attempts from the outside, in the hopes that they’ll be blocked or missed.
What we do know is that every team, no matter the system, is looking to limit good chances and prime scoring opportunities. That’s measured through expected goals. Using NaturalStatTrick.com, we can look at expected-goals against per 60 at 5-on-5 to see which defensemen are limiting not just shots or attempts but quality of chances (minimum 500 minutes). Your top five:
Nate Schmidt – 1.83
Jonas Siegenthaler – 1.88
Jordan Spence – 1.91
Vladislav Gavrikok – 1.93
Artem Zub – 1.95
But it’s not that simple as just handing the award to Schmidt, much like the leader in WAR should just get the American and National League MVPs (or should, but then we’d ruin at least a third of baseball podcasts and writing). There’s context. One, how often did these players start in the offensive zone? After all, it’s easier to keep chances against your goalie low if your shifts are starting some 180 feet away. Schmidt started 56 percent of his shifts in the offensive zone, whereas Siegenthaler started only 34 percent, Spence was at 46 percent, Gavrikov was 36 percent, and Zub at 35 percent.
If we were to distill it down even more, we would look at which d-men were lowering chances at a greater rate than their team. Slavin is a great player, the best d-man on Carolina, but he also benefits greatly from Carolina being a great defensive teams as a whole. Carolina’s chance-suppression doesn’t really change when Slavin is on or off the ice.
So who have the best relative expected goals against numbers at 5-on-5?
Adam Pelech – -0.74
Artem Zub 0 -0.69
Jonas Siegenthaler – -0.58
Ryan Graves – 0.55
Justin Barron – -0.54
Funny enough, Fox finished 6th on this list, which might change mine and all his peers’ world view, though he started 65 percent of his shifts in the offensive zone, a great boost. So they and I still get to be stubborn jerkwads about Fox. Everybody wins!
As we can see, both Zub and Siegenthaler show up on both lists. Both were given the dungeon shifts by their coaches consistently. Not only did both keep changes to a minimum while they were on the ice, while having to start closest to their own goal a majority of the time, but both did so well above the rate the rest of their team did. They were the defensive stoppers for their teams. So they would have been finalists for this mythical award. I’m sure they’re mythically delighted.
Who Would Have Won The Best Defensive Defenseman Award?