One of my expressed goals for the summer was coming up with a way to determine the value of defensive defenseman.
It hasn't gone all that well.
A result of this endeavor, however, was the realization that NHL GM's pay entirely too much for offense from the blueline. By way of introduction, here's the leagues top paid blueliners next season, by cap hit:
Zdeno Chara
Nicklas Lidstrom
Brian Campbell
Scott Niedermayer
Jay Bouwmeester
Dan Boyle
Wade Redden
Dion Phaneuf
Ed Jovomonkey
Kimmo Timonen
Chris Pronger
Brian Rafalski
Andrei Markov
Bryan McCabe
Lubomir Visnovsky
Some of these guys play against top notch competition. Some don't. They all play on the PP. Some got their dollars because of a single season of offensive brilliance. Some are more consistent.
That's not really the point, though. Here's the ranked ESP rates of all NHL defenders last year. You'll notice that only one rearguard topped 1.5 ESP/60 (Mike Green) and 1 point per 60 minutes of ES time was the 86th percentile. Most of the leagues defenders scored less than a point per hour at 5on5 (even those expensive guys listed above). The mean rate was a mere 0.70 ESP/60.
By contrast, most forwards who garner less than a point per 60 at ES are scrubs - 4th liners, goons, guys on the downslope or the rawest rookies. Of the Flames regular skaters, only Eric Nystrom scored at the defenders mean rate (0.76).
If the rates thing is too ephemeral for some, let's go by the raw totals. last year, only 13 defenders scored 50 or more points. Three scored 20 or more goals. Not even 30 guys broke the 40 point plateau.
Now, it's only human to covet that which is rare. The unique is frquently in high demand. Thus why blueliners with relatively big points score massive contracts. But to my eye, paying a guy 6M to score 50 points a year is poor use of cap space in most instances - because forwards are far more efficient producers of offense.
96 forwards scored 50 or more points last season. One hundred and seventeen of them scored 20 or more goals. Sunny Mehta recently posted this article on the subject of positional shooting percentage - in his analysis, he found that forwards averaged 134 goals over 1385 shots or 9.6% in 08/09. Defensemen averaged just 18 goals over 442 shots for a 4.1% average.
By the virtue of the nature of their position, forwards are more dangerous offensively - they get closer to to the net and therefore manage more shots from better positions. Plus, many of them are more adept offensively, that being a primary requirement of being a forward.
What's more, Defenders are even more circumstantially reliant than forwards when it comes to generating offense. Blueliners need lots of ice time (since they are much more inefficient at scoring), they need capable forwards (since a bulk of a defenders points come in the form of assists) and they need favorable deployment by the coach (PP time, offensive zone draws, weaker match-ups). Take a gander at the ranked defender offense by efficiency table: you'll notice a lot of names in the 90th percentile or above are 3rd pairing guys who didn't actually score a lot of points (Goligoski, Giordano, Bogosian, Lebda, Hunwick, Montador). All sheltered. All limited ice-time. They scored at a good rate, but didn't have enough volume of minutes to make much of an impact. And even with the best circumstances - think lots of PP time, second tier competition, lots of offensive zone face-offs - your 6.5M PP quarterback might not even break the 50 point barrier.
The flip side, of course, is that defensive defenseman are relatively undervalued in the league. Let's look at that list of cap hits again. How many inside the top 30 are "pure defensive" types? I count three: Hannan (4.5M), Komisarek (4.5M) and Brewer (4.25M). Jan Hejda took on some of the toughest competition in the league for the Blue Jackets last year. He wouldn't even register on most fans radars: not only because he isn't the flashiest of players, but because his counting stats are necessarily suppressed by the circumstances in which he plays - own zone draws versus tough assignments. How would his results look like if someone else was getting fed to the wolves? Because the range of production at ES for rearguards is so limited (1.50 - 0), it probably makes sense to have a team full of $2M Jan Hejda's: you'd likely find a production efficiency curve based on the level of competition (and concurrent circumstances, ie face-off position) each Hejda clone was facing. Put another way - Cory Sarich faced the second toughest competition on the Flames amongst defensemen in 07/08 - he had a negative corsi rate and scored 0.25 ESP/60. Last year, Sarich spent most of the season on the third pairing. His level of competition was on par with Mark Giordano. His corsi jumped to +10 and his ESP rate more than tripled to .89.
So when GM's shell out dollars for points from the blueline, a lot of the time they're probably paying for a perception based on circumstances. They're also putting money into a vastly inferior offensive option in terms of efficiency relative to forwards. This isn't to say that some defensemen aren't better than others offensively speaking - that's self-evidently false. However, even the best defenders offensive contributions are muted. Suppressed by the demands of the position, by circumstances and by the fact thet they're beholden to the men in front of them; defenders need a lot of things to go right in order to be (seen as) offensively capable. Even then, they probably won't outscore your better than average 2nd liner.
As such, I think it makes sense to invest the big dollars (assuming offense is the goal) in forwards and then target the guys who can quietly handle the tough minutes in the defensive end. Like goaltending, it may make sense to abandon this strategy if one of the truly elite players is available (Nik Lidstrom), but, overall, I think the market overvalues offense from the back-end.
