Welcome to Part 2, In Part 1 I looked at the short history of the Pacific Division and what the third place team needed to make the playoffs.
In Part 2 of this series I wanted to take a look at the Defence core of every team in the Pacific Division. The simple reason for this? Defence wins Championships! To me that statement doesn’t necessarily mean defensive structure or best talent. That statement means more to me that a team needs a good system, good depth and different skill sets among a number of things. What I have often looked for and heard is to have a decent top 4 Defence core. In this post by Woodguy, he shed a lot of light on that, and that it actually is true. So what I decided to do was look at each team’s Defence core in terms of height, weight, age, experience level and points. I decided to leave the fancy stats out of this post due to the fact there are 7 teams in the division and it might be an overflow of data. I am going to break it down by the California teams and then Arizona, Calgary and Vancouver.
Anaheim
The top 8 Defencemen listed on the roster according to NHL.com when I started this exercise are as follows.
[table id=12 /]
Los Angeles
[table id=13 /]San Jose
[table id=14 /]
The California teams have been known to have better defence than the rest of the division. They are also more successful. These two things seem to go hand in hand. Defence definitely isn’t the only thing but it is a major part of a team’s success. To restate I did the California teams first due to the fact they have had the most success.
Arizona
[table id=16 /]
Calgary
[table id=17 /]
Vancouver
[table id=18 /]
Edmonton
[table id=19 /]
All of the Heights & Weights come from NHL.com and remaining statistics are before the season started and come from HockeyDB.com
Random Thoughts
I attempted to look at the Defence groups as a whole. Looking at a few different areas (height, weight, age, NHL GP, career points, career goals) I meant to take a “snap shot” at what they offered as a sum of traditional statistical metrics. The reason I decided to go with career Points Per Game and career Goals per Game, was to make it a fairly level playing field.
What stood out to me? First of all Edmonton desperately needs a puck mover. Edmonton’s defence is not likely to take a full stride for another season or so. Why? I have believed for a long time that defence take time to mature. I typically look for 250 games of NHL experience and with them in “Prime Playing age”. I am a big fan of Eric Tulsky’s work; it seems like Ron Francis and the Carolina Hurricanes agree with me as they hired him. There are a few more Studies out there, and what is exactly “Prime Playing age”; most studies narrow prime down to ages 24-29 , other studies show that a defenceman’s “prime” years are longer than a forward’s, extending to around age 33.
What does this mean for Edmonton?
In terms of height and weight the Oilers defence stacks up just fine, but where they really lack compared to the other teams is that consistent high-end point producer. I know this is obvious for most Oilers fans, but it also really shows up when you compare them to the rest of the Division. The Oilers are currently built to rely on offence from the back-end as a committee. While this isn’t a bad thing, you can certainly expect to have some dry spells with that build out whereas a team like Anaheim or Calgary currently has a few defenceman that have a higher level of skill with the puck. Arizona was clearly missing a defenceman with this kind of capabilities and experience and went out and added Goligoski. San Jose and LA have a few really good players that hide the lack of depth on their back ends.
Who is out there?
I am a big believer that Justin Faulk would be an excellent addition to this defence core. Aside from that, a few names I would encourage Chiarelli to aggressively try to acquire are: Jared Spurgeon, Ryan Ellis, Matt Dumba, Tyson Barrie and “in Division” opponent Sami Vatanen. I am a big believer in Rightie-Leftie balance and I see the Oilers need a clear top 4 D who shoots right and can play the powerplay and drive offence. Adding a “top 2” defenceman would be massive but few of these come around and it also isn’t crucial. The Oilers need clearly as someone who we need to expect to garner in the 40 points per season range. A few “under the radar” names I have a lot of time for are Colin Miller and Ryan Sproul.
I thought it might be handy to have all the above Defenceman in one table to sort the columns for quick comparison.
[table id=20 /]
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