Assessing the Canuck D: Some Interesting Numbers

[JamesB]

Travis Green has said the D needs to be better next year and I doubt if anyone would disagree. We can hope that Tanev and Guddy are healthier, we hope the Canucks win the lottery and draft Dahlin, and we can hope that younger guys come back better and ready to play at an NHL level (Juolevi, Hutton, Stecher, Pouliot). And there is always the possibility of a trade or UFA pick-up.

 

While we are waiting for any of those things to happen, I think it is interesting to take a careful look at the advanced (and not-so-advanced) stats at CORSICA and Natural Stat Trick to pick out what I think are some interesting and/or important numbers in assessing the D. There are no big surprises, but here are some interesting points.

 

1. Scoring. Travis Green has complained (rightly) about the lack of scoring from the D. And we can easily see the scoring numbers from this year. (Edler led with 34 pts and MDZ and Pouliot both had 22). But of course guys who play more, especially on the PP, will get more points.

 

So I looked at points per 60 minutes played at even strength. The leader was still Edler (no surprise) at 0.88. Second spot is a surprise. It goes to Tanev at .8. He only had 11 pts but he only played in 42 games and had basically no PP time. Third place went to the Biega at 0.78 -- also a surprise.  At the other end, Guddy was low, as we expect, at 0.37 but he was not the lowest. Hutton had an abysmal number of 0.19.

 

Using round numbers, to be a legitimate "offensive D-man" you should be at least at 1.0 or better on this stat. Edler is not too far away but, obviously, the Canucks do not have a legitimate offensive D-man. And MDZ and Pouliot are not as good as we might think. Correcting for time on ice and PP opportunities they are both well behind Tanev and Biega!

 

I am not sure where improved scoring on the D will come from next year. Let's hope we win the lottery and draft Dahlin. Or can Pettersson play D?

 

2. Hits and Blocked Shots. Turning to defensive play, we expect D's to make hits and block shots. Most people probably know that MDZ led the team in hits, but if we look at hits per 60 minutes, the leader is Biega, by a pretty big margin at 11.4. MDZ is next at 9.7, then Guddy at 8.4 and Edler at 6.4. Frankly, I think we should expect more out of Guddy given his skill set, but I assume his shoulder injury was a problem. On the low end, Tanev was at 1.7 -- but he is a guy we don't want making hits given his defensive value and all the punishment he takes anyway. Hutton was also very low at 2.5 -- much too low for his role on the team. 

 

As for blocked shots, Edler has a comfortable lead at 7.4 per 60 minutes followed, interestingly, by Pouliot at 6.2 then Tanev at 5.2. Low guys are Stecher (3.0) and Hutton (3.4). As has often been pointed out, blocked shots is a hard stat to interpret because you only block shots when you don't have the puck. If you control the puck a lot, your blocked shots go down. On the other hand, if you don't have the puck it is better to block a shot than to not block a shot. Anyway, not much going on with this stat.

 

3. Quality of Opposition. The main job of the D is keep the other team from scoring and turning the puck around to go the other way. How do we measure that? We can use plus/minus, corsi, or other shot metrics but there is a lot of controversy over how to do it. A big issue is quality of opposition. If you are out there against McDavid or MacKinnon you are going to give up more goals and more shots than a D pairing that is usually up against no-name 4th liners, or even against pretty good 3rd liners. But there is no good way of adjusting for quality of competition. There are some metrics, but they are generally very poor. Using Corsi numbers to assess quality of competition is particularly bad. However, I think the best simple metric is time on ice as calculated by CORSICA. I used time on ice based on all situations (not just even strength), which I think is the best measure. The idea here is to measure the quality of the players you are up against by looking at their share of time on ice in a given game, as the better players generally play more. There is generally a big difference in quality between forwards who play, say, 20 minutes a game (first liners) and those who play 10 minutes a game (4th liners).

 

I won't report the numbers here but will state the rankings. Edler has toughest quality of competition, followed closely by Tanev. There is a bit of a gap, then comes Guddy, MDZ, Stecher, and Hutton in the middle group. Pouliot and Biega faced relatively easy quality of competition.

 

Zone starts also matter. For any given quality of competition, you are more likely to give up a goal or a shot if you start in the D-zone and more likely to be on the ice for a goal or shot if you start in the O-zone. Pouliot is the big beneficiary here with 57% O-zone starts. Tanev had the toughest starts with only 42% O-zone starts. Guddy and Edler also had a preponderance of D-zone starts at even strength. The others were fairly close to 50-50.

 

One surprising fact is that, despite his tough starts and high quality of competition, Tanev led the D in even-strength plus minus and was actually in positive territory despite playing shutdown on a bad team. That is unusual and impressive.

 

4. Plus-minus and shot metrics. There are lots of arguments against plus/minus. The most important is that it does not adjust for quality of competition. Also, there is a lot of luck in +/- (i.e. a lot of variance) in a small sample, or even over a full year, so +/- is not very stable from year to year. That indicates that it is a noisy measure of performance. Shot metrics are more stable and are therefore better predictors of future performance. There are a lot of adjustments that could made to corsi numbers, including score adjustments (teams attempt more shots when they are behind), and not all shot attempts are equal. The shot metric that I like is "High Danger Corsi For". This is based on shot attempts from high danger areas.The leader on the Canuck D is on this metric is Alex Biega! Low man is Gudbranson. This is partly explained by quality of competition and zone starts but, even so, Biega's numbers are surprisingly good and Guddy's are disappointing.

 

5. One more stat. One more stat that I find interesting is takeaways per 60 min. The leader on this is Pouliot at 1.2, followed by Stecher and Edler at 1.1. Guddy is low man at 0.3.

 

6. Special Teams: The above is all for even-strength. I won't cover PK and PP but I will note that Edler is clearly the team leader on special teams.

 

Conclusions: Using stats to evaluate D-men is hard, but so is the "eye-test" given the high level of confirmation bias that most people have (seeing what they expect to see or want to see). On the basis of stats there are some warning signs:

 

1. Edler is far and away the most valuable D. At least he was last year. Calls to "trade Edler" only make sense if the objective is to tank next year.

 

2. There is not much evidence from last year that Pouliot is a legitimate NHL D. Given his favorable zone starts and relatively easy quality of competition, his +/- (-22 overall) can only be described as dismal. With that level of play it is hard to see how he is even in the NHL. There is a reason Pittsburgh traded him for an AHL player. At age 24, he might still improve, but the years when players normally improve a lot are behind him.  

 

3. Hutton had a bad year. Period. Claims that "advanced stats" tell a different story are not right. At least it takes a lot of cherry-picking to make Hutton look good. (He was pretty good on the PK, but that was against 2nd unit PPs was a pretty small sample.) 

 

4. Guddy did not have a good season. His strengths (physical game, PK) were not as strong as they should be and his weaknesses are real (no offense, gets hemmed in his own zone). We can hope that he will be better if he comes back healthy next year. 

 

5.  MDZ is a journeyman. He makes hits, plays hard, and provides some offence. But his defence is poor. With roughly average zone starts and quality of competition, his corsi for and high danger corsi for percentages (both  46%) are not good. And his scoring per 60 minutes is not as good as we might have expected. 

 

6. Tanev is excellent defensively, but obviously his health is an issue and he contributes very little to the physical game. He also is nowhere near being a legitimate offensive D-man but still finished second on the team in even strength points per 60 minutes. A classic example of "good news for Tanev, bad news for the team".

 

7. I want to say good things about Stecher but, realistically, it is hard to say more than he is "ok". On the plus side he did well playing shutdown with Edler in the last month of the season. 

 

8. Statistsically, a surprising bright spot is Biega. On the numbers he is a better D than Pouliot or Hutton and competitive with MDZ and Stecher. But if a long run NHL-AHL tweener is your bright spot, well, as Green says, improvement is needed.

 

9. Trade potential: If the Canucks try to trade one of the current D's we should be very, very restrained in our expectations of what we could get in return. Tanev's injuries are a red flag, Hutton and Pouliot are projects, MDZ and Guddy have high cap hits for what they do. And I don't see a big market for Stecher or Biega. 

 

Overall, we will have one good pairing (Edler and Tanev) that would be great as a second pairing but not ideal as a first pairing, several guys who would be fine in a third pairing, a good 7th man (Biega), and lot of question marks regarding the second pairing. 

 

But we should get one or two good D prospects (and some longshots) in this year's draft, and maybe Tryamkin comes back.

 

 

 

[Alflives]

Nicely thought out post.  I disagree in some areas.

[Time Lord]

Good analysis. 

 

One thing that the stats can’t show about Pouliot is that he was actually pretty good early on when the team was playing well. He was even used on the top pair with Edler for a while and didn’t look out of place. When the injuries racked up and the team started to play badly, so did he. And his mistakes just led to more mistakes. I think it’s pretty clear that he has confidence issues but when he’s on his game he’s a valuable puck moving dman with a skill set that this team needs.

 

I’m hoping Juolevi can move ahead of Del Zotto and Hutton on the depth chart, which shouldn’t be hard if he’s ready. I would pair him with Tanev.  I think Pouliot will end up Edler. This leaves Stecher and Gudbranson to fight for the right side on the 3rd pair, and Hutton/Del Zotto on the left. But I don’t think Green would bench DZ or Gudbranson let alone both. 

[hlinkas wrister]

I say we bring them all back and pick first overall in the draft we're hosting.

[CaptainLinden16]

1 hour ago, JamesB said:

Travis Green has said the D needs to be better next year and I doubt if anyone would disagree. We can hope that Tanev and Guddy are healthier, we hope the Canucks win the lottery and draft Dahlin, and we can hope that younger guys come back better and ready to play at an NHL level (Juolevi, Hutton, Stecher, Pouliot). And there is always the possibility of a trade or UFA pick-up.

 

While we are waiting for any of those things to happen, I think it is interesting to take a careful look at the advanced (and not-so-advanced) stats at CORSICA and Natural Stat Trick to pick out what I think are some interesting and/or important numbers in assessing the D. There are no big surprises, but here are some interesting points.

 

1. Scoring. Travis Green has complained (rightly) about the lack of scoring from the D. And we can easily see the scoring numbers from this year. (Edler led with 34 pts and MDZ and Pouliot both had 22). But of course guys who play more, especially on the PP, will get more points.

 

So I looked at points per 60 minutes played at even strength. The leader was still Edler (no surprise) at 0.88. Second spot is a surprise. It goes to Tanev at .8. He only had 11 pts but he only played in 42 games and had basically no PP time. Third place went to the Biega at 0.78 -- also a surprise.  At the other end, Guddy was low, as we expect, at 0.37 but he was not the lowest. Hutton had an abysmal number of 0.19.

 

Using round numbers, to be a legitimate "offensive D-man" you should be at least at 1.0 or better on this stat. Edler is not too far away but, obviously, the Canucks do not have a legitimate offensive D-man. And MDZ and Pouliot are not as good as we might think. Correcting for time on ice and PP opportunities they are both well behind Tanev and Biega!

 

I am not sure where improved scoring on the D will come from next year. Let's hope we win the lottery and draft Dahlin. Or can Pettersson play D?

 

2. Hits and Blocked Shots. Turning to defensive play, we expect D's to make hits and block shots. Most people probably know that MDZ led the team in hits, but if we look at hits per 60 minutes, the leader is Biega, by a pretty big margin at 11.4. MDZ is next at 9.7, then Guddy at 8.4 and Edler at 6.4. Frankly, we should expect more out of Guddy given his skill set, but I assume his shoulder injury was a problem. On the low end, Tanev was at 1.7 -- but he is a guy we don't want making hits given his defensive value and all the punishment he takes anyway. Hutton was also very low at 2.5 -- much too low for his role on the team. 

 

As for blocked shots, Edler has a comfortable lead at 7.4 per 60 minutes followed, interestingly, by Pouliot at 6.2 then Tanev at 5.2. Low guys are Stecher (3.0) and Hutton (3.4). As has often been pointed out, blocked shots is a hard stat to interpret because you only block shots when you don't have the puck. If you control the puck a lot, your blocked shots go down. On the other hand, if you don't have the puck it is better to block a shot than to not block a shot. Anyway, not much going on with this stat.

 

3. Quality of Opposition. The main job of the D is keep the other team from scoring and turning the puck around to go the other way. How do we measure that? We can use plus/minus, corsi, or other shot metrics but there is a lot of controversy over how to do it. A big issue is quality of opposition. If you are out there against McDavid or MacKinnon you are going to give up more goals and more shots than a D pairing that is usually up against no-name 4th liners, or even against pretty good 3rd liners. But there is no good way of adjusting for quality of competition. There are some metrics, but they are generally very poor. Using Corsi numbers to assess quality of competition is particularly bad. However, I think the best simple metric is time on ice as calculated by CORSICA. The idea here is to measure the quality of the players you are up against by looking at their share of time on ice in a given game, as the better players generally play more. There is generally a big difference in quality between forwards who play, say, 20 minutes a game (first liners) and those who play 10 minutes a game (4th liners).

 

I won't report the numbers here but will state the rankings. Edler has toughest quality of competition, followed closely by Tanev. There is a bit of a gap, then comes Guddy, MDZ, Stecher, and Hutton in the middle group. Pouliot and Biega faced relatively easy quality of competition.

 

Zone starts also matter. For any given quality of competition, you are more likely to give up a goal or a shot if you start in the D-zone and more likely to be on the ice for a goal or shot if you start in the O-zone. Pouliot is the big beneficiary here with 57% O-zone starts. Tanev had the toughest starts with only 42% O-zone starts. Guddy and Edler also had a preponderance of D-zone starts at even strength. The others were fairly close to 50-50.

 

One surprising fact is that, despite his tough starts and high quality of competition, Tanev led the D in even-strength plus minus and was actually in positive territory despite playing shutdown on a bad team. That is unusual.

 

4. Plus-minus and shot metrics. There are lots of arguments against plus/minus. The most important is that it does not adjust for quality of competition. Also, there is a lot of luck in +/- (i.e. a lot of variance) in a small sample, or even over a full year, so +/- is not very stable from year to year. That indicates that it is a noisy measure of performance. Shot metrics are more stable and are therefore better predictors of future performance. There are a lot of adjustments that could made to corsi numbers, including score adjustments (teams attempt more shots when they are behind), and not all shot attempts are equal. The shot metric that I like is "High Danger Corsi For". This is based on shot attempts from high danger areas.The leader on the Canuck D is on this metric is Alex Biega! Low man is Gudbranson. This is partly explained by quality of competition and zone starts but, even so, Biega's numbers are surprisingly good and Guddy's are disappointing.

 

5. One more stat. One more stat that I find interesting is takeaways per 60 min. The leader on this is Pouliot at 1.2, followed by Stecher and Edler at 1.1. Guddy is low man at 0.3.

 

6. Special Teams: The above is all for even-strength. I won't cover PK and PP but I will note that Edler is clearly the team leader on special teams.

 

Conclusions: Using stats to evaluate D-men is hard, but so is the "eye-test" given the high level of confirmation bias that most people have (seeing what they expect to see or want to see). On the basis of stats there are some warning signs:

 

1. Edler is far and away the most valuable D. At least he was last year. Calls to "trade Edler" only make sense if the objective is to tank next year.

 

2. There is not much evidence from last year that Pouliot is a legitimate NHL D. Given his favorable zone starts and relatively easy quality of competition, his +/- (-22 overall) can only be described as dismal. With that level of play it is hard to see how he is even in the NHL. There is a reason Pittsburgh traded him for an AHL player. At age 24, he might still improve, but the years when players normally improve a lot are behind him.  

 

3. Hutton had a bad year. Period. Claims that "advanced stats" tell a different story are not right. At least it takes a lot of cherry-picking to make Hutton look good. (He was pretty good on the PK, but that was against 2nd unit PPs was a pretty small sample.) 

 

4. Guddy did not have a good season. His strengths (physical game, PK) were not as strong as they should be and his weaknesses are real (no offense, gets hemmed in his own zone). We can hope that he will be better if he comes back healthy next year. 

 

5.  MDZ is a journeyman. He makes hits, plays hard, and provides some offence. But his defence is poor. With roughly average zone starts and quality of competition, his corsi for and high danger corsi for percentages (both  46%) are not good. And his scoring per 60 minutes is not as good as we might have expected. 

 

6. Tanev is excellent defensively, but obviously his health is an issue and contributes nothing to the physical game. He also is nowhere near being a legitimate offensive D-man but still finished second on the team in even strength points per 60 minutes. A classic example of "good news for Tanev, bad news for the team".

 

7. I want to say good things about Stecher but, realistically, it is hard to say more than he is "ok". On the plus side he did well playing shutdown with Edler in the last month of the season. 

 

8. Statistsically, a surprising bright spot is Biega. On the numbers he is a better D than Pouliot or Hutton and competitive with MDZ and Stecher. But if a long run NHL-AHL tweener is your bright spot, well, as Green says, improvement is needed.

 

9. Trade potential: If the Canucks try to trade one of the current D's we should be very, very restrained in our expectations of what we could get in return. Tanev's injuries are a red flag, Hutton and Pouliot are projects, MDZ and Guddy have high cap hits for what they do. And I don't see a big market for Stecher or Biega. 

 

But we should get one or two good D prospects in this year's draft, and maybe Tryamkin comes back.

 

 

 

I know this is flame worthy, but I have consistently said that Biega is the 2nd best defenseman on the team.  I know that he can't play 82 games at that level as no one has that kind of energy, but for 40 or so games the guy is awesome.  I would agree with the vast majority of this analysis in every aspect.

[coastal.view]

i appreciate the post

including the explanation you gave of your view of some of the stats

overall your assessment matches my views of the canucks d

not even an average group as a whole

 

we can dream about winning the draft lottery

and i certainly am prepared to wait for that outcome

 

if the likely does occur, and the canucks do not land first place overall

and if it appears unlikely after the tea has acquired a dman in the draft who can likely step in and perform at a high level fairly quickly

i think the team really needs to use a chunk of available cap space to spend on a quality dman

the team should be prepared to offer annual value and term (4 to 6 years)

there is likely no quick fix coming to this d corp

and an upgrade is required for next season

[Phat Fingers]

Great work JB. 

[Solinar]

I kind of follow all the western teams, and it kind of reminds me a lot of the Flames of a few years past.  When Giordano and Brodie were on the ice, the team was good, when they stepped off the ice, the team was a tire fire.  The pairing of Edler and Tanev are good, and if we had 2 other good pairings, we wouldn't be having this conversation at all.  On a good team, Edler and Tanev are your 2nd pairing that you'd trust in all situations, and would probably safely put up between 20-35 pts.  On our team, we're mad because they aren't a good first pairing compared to competitive teams first pairings.  It isn't their fault, its ours, and we're lucky we still have the both of them, and we'd be worse without them.

  Stecher is a complimentary piece that will play well with a good defensive partner, but will not make a pairing good on his own.  Gudbranson is the kind of defenseman that needs a player akin to Dustin Byfuglien or Erik Karlson.  He's a support player that is best paired with an offensive threat.  Sort of like Methot.  Poulliot needs a steady hand to allow him to range.  Hutton....needs to come back in in better shape and show that he's NHL calibre.  He has upside, but I don't know if we have the person to play with him to bring that out, and at best he's looking like a fringe #4.  Biega is a perfect 7th defenseman in the mould of Rome.  Feisty, tenacious, makes safe plays, but really doesn't bring more to the table than what you've already seen.  God I wish someone would give him some vaseline, so that his hands were silky soft.

  I think we have the recipe for something better with some of the pieces we have, but by the time the ship is righted, I'm pretty sure we'll be left with only 2-3 of what we have at the moment.  With defensemen, in my mind, you have to work at making a stable pairing, not having individuals.

  As to our poster, I love your analysis, and break down of each defenseman, and I concur.  I just don't see us being 1 guy away from righting the ship.  Even with Dahlin, we'd have to hope that Juolevi could slot in on the left, and that we have a break thru of season from our right side defensemen.

 

 

[Industrious1]

Let me preface this by saying I don't necessarily disagree with the OP....but essentially what is being said is that our defense is a disaster (outside of some decent play by Edler and Biega).

 

After watching about half the games this year i'd say that is fairly accurate, and that we are years away from rectifying this problem.  Offense looks bright and with Demko on the rise I am hoping goaltending isn't an issue but the best way to get good Dmen is to develop them and sadly we are lagging way behind and when we want to contend this could will be a serious issue.

[xereau]

Don't be surprised if the Canucks upgrade Baumgartner, even this off season.

[Adarsh Sant]

Tanev is interesting because his on-ice value is much higher than his trade value because of frequent injury.

 

But yeah I agree that none of our D have much trade value. Juolevi is an unknown but he's not getting traded.

[canuckpuckluck1]

Good post OP thanks for crunching the numbers and giving the rest of us some solid information to process.

Something that screams out to me being a sports player (not hockey) is that without offense it is very difficult to apply pressure to the opposition. They can continue to put pressure on  your defence relentlessly. That was evident so much this year for the Canucks. If you recall there was a few games when the Canucks got away early and ended up winning with 5 or 6 goals. In those games the Canucks defence held solid and looked good.

I truely believe once the Canucks get some of these young hotshots hitting the back of the net a fair amount of pressure will be lifted from the defence and players like Pouliot and Hutton wont struggle to get the puck out of their own end. 

If the forwards can apply their own pressure to the opposition the defence will look so much better statistically.

Some better goal tending wouldnt go astray either. Those soft goals early in the first period really make a defenders game that much harder. 

[Adarsh Sant]

Can't wait for @oldnews and @Hutton Wink when they read what the OP said about Mr. Gudbranson

[NewbieCanuckFan]

1 hour ago, Industrious1 said:

Let me preface this by saying I don't necessarily disagree with the OP....but essentially what is being said is that our defense is a disaster (outside of some decent play by Edler and Biega).

 

After watching about half the games this year i'd say that is fairly accurate, and that we are years away from rectifying this problem.  Offense looks bright and with Demko on the rise I am hoping goaltending isn't an issue but the best way to get good Dmen is to develop them and sadly we are lagging way behind and when we want to contend this could will be a serious issue.

I'm as worried about our blueline as anybody but I think one should add to your post but stating....*provided* the blueline stays 100% healthy, it should be "ok enough".  The problem is, the only depth on the roster is towards the bottom pairing.  

[luckylager]

Thanks for putting in the effort @JamesB

Our D is horrible, I was saying it all season and I don't see it changing any time soon.

To be fair, I feel like you under-sold Stecher. His game has been steadily improving which is more than we can say about ANY of our other D. So Edler was a more dedicated pylon this year, that was great, real gud.

 

I want to defend Guddy. I expected more from him though. Hopefully next year he's FINALLY healthy for the first time since coming to town.

 

MDZ is average, Hutton and Pouliot are horrible. 

 

If Juolevi can't chase Hutty or Pouliot I'll be greatly disappointed. I couldn't pick him in your polls though. Bit soon IMO

[CanadianRugby]

5 hours ago, JamesB said:

1. Edler is far and away the most valuable D. At least he was last year. Calls to "trade Edler" only make sense if the objective is to tank next year.

Most underrated Canuck.  

[GB5]

1 hour ago, luckylager said:

Thanks for putting in the effort @JamesB

Our D is horrible, I was saying it all season and I don't see it changing any time soon.

To be fair, I feel like you under-sold Stecher. His game has been steadily improving which is more than we can say about ANY of our other D. So Edler was a more dedicated pylon this year, that was great, real gud.

 

I want to defend Guddy. I expected more from him though. Hopefully next year he's FINALLY healthy for the first time since coming to town.

 

MDZ is average, Hutton and Pouliot are horrible. 

 

If Juolevi can't chase Hutty or Pouliot I'll be greatly disappointed. I couldn't pick him in your polls though. Bit soon IMO

I would pretty much say the same. All in the the defense on this team is well below average for an NHL team and most of these guys don't have a lot of upward potential.

 

Stecher is certainly a fearless warrior, he gets by ok defensively but I would like to see some offense from him to be deserving of a roster spot.

 

Pouliot has had some glimpses but far too often when there has been a bad goal he seems to be the one out of position. I hope he gets better though as he is one of the few who possibly has room to grow.

 

I would love to see a healthy Guddy play most of a season, maybe then we could really tell if he is real Gud or real bad.

[HC20.0]

Thanks for posting this. I know Edler was our best Dman this year, but I didn’t realize how valuable he actually is. I also didn’t realize our D was THAT bad. Some pretty big red flags there. 

[SID.IS.SID.ME.IS.ME]

Nice work @JamesB

 

I agree on most points.

 

However, I feel like as one of the Hutton defenders, and one who sometimes uses stats, I should make some kind of comment. 

 

I agree Hutton had a bad year. Probably the worst of his career. And to make his season look like a rousing success, you'd need to really cherry pick the numbers. But I don't think that's ever been the intention of people who've called attention to the stats.

 

It's more about where he ranks among the other defensemen on the team.

 

When you look at his stats, in terms of many of the on-ice team metrics, he doesn't appear too often at the bottom of the charts. Especially when you look at things like against rates and differentials. More often than not, Hutton is somewhere near the top or the middle of the pack.

 

For example (and these numbers are all for 5v5):

 

CA/60 (Corsi against per 60): Hutton is #3 (3rd lowest Corsi events against per 60 minutes) among all Ds who played for Vancouver in 2017-18. He's better than Pouliot, Biega, Stecher, MDZ, Edler, and Gudbranson (I'm just mentioning the regulars here).

 

CF%: Hutton is again #3. And ahead of Stecher, Tanev, Edler, MDZ, and Gudbranson.

 

FA/60 (Fenwick against per 60): Hutton is #5 (fewest--in events-against rates you want to have low numbers) . Better than Edler, Stecher, MDZ, and Gudbranson (among the regulars).

 

FF%: Hutton is #6. Ahead of Edler, Tanev, MDZ, and Gudbranson.

 

SA/60 (Shots against per 60): Hutton is #5. Better than Edler, Stecher, MDZ, and Gudbranson.

 

SF%: Hutton is #5. Better than Stecher, Edler, Tanev, MDZ, and Gudbranson.

 

SCA/60 (Scoring chances against per 60): Hutton is #3. Better than Tanev, Pouliot, Stecher, Gudbranson, Edler, and MDZ.

 

SCF%: Hutton is #3. Better than Stecher, MDZ, Edler, Tanev, and Gudbranson.

 

HDCA/60 (High danger changes against per 60): Hutton is #2. Better than Edler, Gudbranson, Tanev, Stecher, Biega, Pouliot, and MDZ.

 

HDCF%: Hutton is #4. Better than Edler, Pouliot, Tanev, Stecher, MDZ, and Gudbranson.

 

So that's where he shakes out on the most common events numbers. I looked at events-against because I consider them more important that events-for when assessing defensemen.

 

I also looked at the events-for percentages (events for divided by events for+against) just to give more of a window into how the team performs overall during Hutton's on-ice minutes.

 

When I look at those numbers, I don't see a player who's really hurting his team.

 

In fact, when it comes to the suppression side of the equation, he seems to be helping more than many of the other Ds did last season.

 

His differentials are a little weaker, but that actually seems to be driven from the offensive side more than the defensive side. 

 

I especially find it interesting how well Hutton fares on scoring changes, and particularly, limiting the high danger chances.

 

Many of the Ds that had worse results are the same ones that are usually considered to be our best options when looking to prevent scoring chances and defend the high danger areas.

 

So why is Hutton getting better results?

 

I don't necessarily believe he's better at stopping attacking players from getting their scoring chances off once they've gained a high danger scoring area. Rather, I think one of Hutton's underrated areas is his ability to prevent zone entries and thereby eliminate chances before they become chances (if that makes sense). In other words, he's not stopping chances in the "home plate" area but he's stopping them at the blue line. This shows up in some of the micro stats work you see referenced at places like Canucks Army and Nucks Misconduct. Admittedly, the public data isn't great, as it's manually tracked and incomplete. But you can get a sense from these numbers that Hutton is having a positive impact in the neutral zone and this is likely what's driving his low per minute rates of events against. He's suppressing opposition offenses in the neutral zone. Which isn't something that shows well on the eye test, especially at the speed of the game. But it does show up in microstat tracking (where the samples suggest he was actually the best D on the team at limiting opposition carry-ins and in breaking up the play).

 

Similarly, I think Hutton is reducing his events against with his strong numbers in the micro stats around zone exits. His exit failure rate is half that of guys like Gudbranson and Pouliot (in the samples from the linked articles), and we know that failed exits result in a tonne of opposition scoring chances.

 

This is getting a bit longer than planned (and it's also getting late) so I'm gonna try to tie things off here.

 

I also don't want to hijack this thread and make it all about Hutton.

 

I just wanted to note that the stats arguments, at least for me, aren't so much about trying to make Hutton's season a success.

 

It very clearly wasn't.

 

It's more about highlighting some of the positives (especially in terms of on-ice team effect) that show up in the numbers. 

 

The stats suggest to me that Hutton, even in his worst season ever, wasn't necessarily hurting the team all that much, especially defensively.

 

Certainly, his woeful offensive numbers (in terms of the individual counting stats) weren't helping.

 

But in terms of the overall rates, and especially when looked at relative to his teammates, his minutes actually saw the Canucks enjoying some of their better team statistics (in terms of events rates for/against and differentials).

 

I think this bodes well.

 

Hutton had a really tough year. And the issues surrounding his conditioning, questionable commitment to fitness, and overall professionalism are definitely concerns. He's going to need to work hard to correct a few things this summer (and it appears he's properly motivated now). But I think some of the data shows real reasons for optimism. 

 

I also think some of the data also suggests that he's probably a better overall defenseman than several of the other guys in the order who generally managed to avoid the proverbial doghouse of the coach (and many of the fans) this past season. 

 

Not that being better than some of the Ds in this group is much of a claim to fame. Our D was pretty darn awful. Being statistically better than a handful of other guys on a terrible defensive corps isn't really much for a player to hang his hat on.

 

Hutton definitely needs to be a lot better than he was in 2017-18.

 

 

[Whaleroad Train]

I didn't think Stecher did too badly for his sophomore slump year.