IN SEARCH OF PUCK-MOVING ‘D’
Who should the Oilers target?
There are no useful individual performance stats for fairly and accurately measuring the overall defensive play of National Hockey League defencemen, but that’s not the case when it comes to defencemen on the attack.
That’s good news for Oilers fans.
It allows us to dig in and evaluate with some amount of accuracy which D-men Oilers GM Peter Chiarelli should target.
The Oilers are in need of at least one defenceman who can move the puck at an elite level. Right now forwards like Connor McDavid, Leon Draisaitl and Taylor Hall are being held back by the lack of service they get in the way of breakout passes.
Individual offensive metrics — such as points per 60 evenstrength minutes, even strength time on ice and the same two metrics applied to the power play — provide a strong ranking of the top attacking defencemen in the NHL.
If we give equal weight to those three categories, the top 10 attacking D-men in the NHL going strictly by the numbers for the past two years have been (and in order): Erik Karlsson, Brent Burns, Kris Letang, Roman Josi, P.K. Subban, Shea Weber, Mark Giordano, John Klingberg, Tyson Barrie and Justin Faulk.
Does that top-10 list pass the smell test? Are those 10 of the best attacking D-men in the NHL, if not the 10 best?
I’m fairly satisfied with the rankings, even as they’re by no means perfect.
The brilliant Drew Doughty isn’t in the top 10 but he’s 13th overall. Duncan Keith is 14th, Oliver Ekman-Larsson is 18th and Victor Hedman is 25th.
It could well be that players who move the puck well but don’t rush it and don’t take chances at even strength, and also aren’t deployed much on the power play, are somewhat under-rated on this list.
For example, this rating system has the excellent-passing Niklas Hjalmarsson at 93rd overall. That’s not bad, but Hjalmarsson is a better puck mover than that.
He should be in the top 60, but he’s under-rated here mainly because he’s not a power play specialist and he doesn’t get many points, period, preferring to play a conservative game.
I wish I could add in D-zone exit numbers, as well as data on the key passes all these D-men made that led to grade-A scoring chances, but that’s not to be.
Only the sharpest analytics staffs on the most savvy NHL teams are doing the video analysis to collect that kind of crucial individual data. But they keep the information to themselves.
This list of puck-movers accounts for 207 NHL defencemen, every one of them who played a total of more than 900 even strength minutes from 2014-16.
Where did the Oilers’ D-men end up on the puck-moving scale? Oscar Klefbom was 29th, Andrej Sekera 72nd, Darnell Nurse 166th, Brandon Davidson 168th, Adam Pardy 182nd, Eric Gryba 190th and Mark Fayne 194th.
Essentially, the Oilers have one top-pairing puck mover in Klefbom, a second pairing player in Sekera, two bottom-pairing puck movers in Nurse and Davidson and three seventh defencemen in Pardy, Gryba and Fayne.
It’s been reported that Tyson Barrie, ranked ninth overall here, will be traded this summer.
Other top-ranking attacking D-men who might be available include Dennis Wideman (12th overall), Keith Yandle (20th), Alex Goligoski (26th), Kevin Shattenkirk (36th), Sami Vatanen (42nd), David Savard (50th), James Wisniewski (52nd), Kris Russell (55th) and Jason Demers (81st).
Of course, some of these puckmoving defenders can’t actually defend very well. In fact, some really stink at it.
And some of the top puckmoving D-men are trending downward as players and are best avoided.
Unless you do the video work and study each player’s defensive and offensive work far more closely, it’s hard to nail down which of the players is the best bet.
There are players to definitely avoid in this group, but there are also a handful to now target for intensive video analysis, the kind that will keep the Oilers from yet again wasting dollars and term on a defenceman like Nikita Nikitin. Nikitin was actually a decent puck-mover, but hustle and defence were generally alien concepts to him.
Only a few of these available D-men can fill that gaping empty slot at the top of the Oilers blueline roster, but the Oilers have the trade pieces to make such a deal happen.
For the right puck-moving defenceman, it’s time to make that move.