Like defense partner Ryan Murray, Jones’ season is best looked at split in two. Unlike Murray, that split was between two different teams. If you are reading a review of Seth Jones in mid-August, it’s fairly safe to assume you know all about his mid-season arrival in a trade for Ryan Johansen. The split between playing third pair minutes on Nashville, and being a top pair workhorse for Columbus makes reviewing Jones season a tough one.
The Eye Test
When the CBJ first acquired Jones from the Predators, I wrote a fairly detailed post on my first impressions after his first few games with Columbus. I’m not going to delve into that too much, as not much has changed when it comes to the eye test. Jones is still a dynamic skater, who can push the play and help create offense with his legs. He’s got a little more confident in making plays with the puck as the season went along, but he still mostly made the safe pass. That’s not necessarily a bad thing though.
As mentioned in Paul’s review of Murray, the arrival of Jones was a turning point. Jones himself was pretty damn good with the CBJ, but he also allowed Murray to look more like a 2nd overall pick talent. Part of that is the safety of having a positionally sound partner like Jones, who can be both aggressive and defensive due to his skating. I highlighted this somewhat in a Goal breakdown from a little later in the year.
The Stats
So the Eye Test is good – bordering on great – for young Seth Jones. At a glance, the stats looks pretty good too. However, it isn’t quite as rosy as the right side of that chart looks, nor as mediocre as the left side looks.
Regarding his possession stats, Jones was significantly better in Nashville than he was in Columbus. With the Jackets, he was only at 49.51 Corsi For %, although this was 2nd among CBJ defensemen. The hope there is that with a better team around him, and more time to continue gelling with Murray, the pairing will return back to Jones’ Nashville levels (which were elite).
Another feather in Jones’ cap is how much better players were when they played with him. Nearly every CBJ player was better with Jones than away from him. This was especially true for Ryan Murray, who had an abysmal 46.3 CF% away from Jones, and a good-for-a-CBJ-defenseman 49.4 CF% with Jones.
Also boding well for the future, and why the left side of the above chart is misleading, is the tremendous amount of bad luck that Jones had last year. Sometimes you will see a player with an outlier shooting percentage, or on-ice shooting percentage, or on-ice save percentage. When one player has all three at one time, a huge point bounce back nearly always follows.
Among the 124 defensemen with 1000 minutes played last season, Jones was 119th in on-ice shooting percentage, and 94th in on-ice save percentage which combined for a brutal 97.74 PDO – good for for 121st.
Jones tacked on an 111th place finish in individual shooting percentage, at just 1.61%. Contrast that to his 23rd place finish in Corsi% and 13th place finish in individual Corsi For per 60. So Jones was driving play in the right direction and getting shots on net with the best defensemen in the NHL. The pucks were just all going in the wrong net.
For context’s sake, Jones had a shooting percentage of 4.4% his first two seasons which is about average for defensemen. Had he shot at league average, with an average PDO, he would have scored an extra 3-4 even strength goals and picked up a few more assists. Those are not outrageous leaps in logic, and that pretty quickly turns his nice 3 goal, 31 point year into a 6 goal, 40+ point star-making season.
The Grade
That being said, the results were not totally there for Jones in a CBJ uniform. He was the best Jackets defenseman, but was still a negative possession player, and didn’t produce on the scoresheet the way it looked like he should from watching a guy with that much talent play.
However, for stepping into a top pair role at age 21, midway through a season, on a new team, I am perfectly pleased with how his season played out. Given a full off-season to adjust, his tremendous talent, and the shooting percentage numbers, I fully expect a monster season from Jones in 2016-17. But for his abbreviated time with the CBJ last year, he was just above average.
Grade: B
(stats provided by corsica.hockey and Puckalytics)
(chart provided by OwnThePuck)
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