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When I was calculating which forwards take the biggest load in the defensive zone for their teams I was quite struck by the use of Adam Hall in Tampa Bay. He currently leads his team in defensive zone faceoffs at even strength, yet he only plays 8.5 minutes per game. He has taken 219 defensive zone draws and 98 offensive zone draws. Yet among forwards with at least 40 games played he ranks third last in Quality of Competition. Having already seen a similar phenomenon with Kris Draper, it seems that this is a role that many coaches are using on their hockey team: the fourth line plugger that takes on the soft starting in the bad end of the rink. The Edmonton Oilers employ a player like this as well in Kyle Brodziak who has taken 275 draws in the offensive zone and only 121 in the offensive zone. If we can find some other comparable players perhaps we can evaluate Brodziak's performance against some of his peers. Looking for comparables I'm trying to find players who have at least 50 more defensive than offensive zone faceoffs, who play 12 minutes a game or less and who are in the bottom three forwards on their team in Quality of Competition (min. 20 GP). All of these stats can be found either at Vic's time on ice site, or at Behind the Net. I've decided to only take one player per team. The chart shows defensive zone draws, offensive zone draws, the difference between the two, the quality of competition rank relative to the rest of their team and EV time on ice per game:
The next chart will give their results using their Corsi (*5), the Corsi of their team, the difference between the two, their goal differential (*5), the goal differential of their team and the difference between the two.
Conclusions? About a quarter of the league employs a player that works in this assignment. It isn't a fun assignment. Even playing soft competition, consistently starting in the wrong end has a negative effect on the Corsi and GD relative to the rest of the team. Adam Hall stands out here among his peers, as does Kris Draper. I defended Draper somewhat in the last post and this data suggests that he didn't deserve it. I imagine that the Wings will soon be moving on. Hall is signed to a three year deal at 0.6M per with the Lightning which looks like it's a pretty good deal. Brodziak, for his part, doesn't look like a disaster but isn't excelling here either. I would suggest that the Oilers really shouldn't be giving him better than fourth line money (i.e. 1M or less) this coming off season.
The Quality of Competition metric at Behind the Net gets a lot of attention because it brings information that we know is important into numerical form. Recently, many people have come to equate playing the most difficult minutes with the playing the most difficult competition. This isn't totally unreaonable, but it does lack a little bit of context. The QC stats come brom BtN. All the others are from Vic's Time on Ice site.
Take the case of Kris Draper, a center playing for the Detroit Red Wings. Conventional wisdom is that QC is most useful when compared with others on the same team. Using this method Kris Draper ranks third to last on the team among forwards ahead of only his linemate, Kirk Maltby and Darren McCarty who managed to appear in only 13 games. And he's getting killed. His Corsi for the season is -12, which is terrible on the Red Wings and ahead of only McCarty. So what's going on? Is Draper just terrible?
Kris Draper is also taking an abnormally high number of defensive zone faceoffs which are going to effect his ability to succeed. To this point in the season, he's taken 243 defensive zone faceoffs compared with 192 in the offensive zone. He's on the ice for 31.11% of the team's defensive zone draws and only 22.38% of the team's offensive zone draws. His differential is 51 which leads the the Detroit forwards by 32 (Franzen is second).
Could Kris Draper be doing a better job? Yes. On a team that has a Corsi of +760 you'd need a pretty good excuse to be a minus (Franzen, for instance is +256). But this does provide some more context for what Draper is doing. The coach seems to rely on the Zetterberg/Franzen line against top players. A defensive zone faceoff against a team's top line will draw Zetterberg, but if there's a defensive zone faceoff and Zetterberg is getting off the ice or the opposing coach is throwing out a secondary scoring line then it's Draper time.
This is something to keep in mind with the Quality of Competition statistic. That's all it's measuring! There may be a high correlation with the difficulty of minutes, but if you want to talk about difficulty of minutes, more context is probably needed.
Because this is a blog about Yahweh's favourite hockey club, I figure I may as well append a chart providing some context for the Oilers forwards. The players will be organized top to bottom in their ranking in terms of quality of competition among forwards that have played at least twenty games and will include each player's Defensive - Offensive Zone Faceoffs beside his name:
Given these numbers, if we were measuring difficulty of minutes and not just the quality of the competition, I think that guys like Penner, Gagner, Nilsson and Gagner should be coming down the list while Stortini and especially Brodziak should be pushed up. If we value QC and starting position equally, organizing this list by ranking, we would get the following list in terms of difficulty of minutes: Horcoff, Moreau, Pisani, Brodziak/Hemsky, Penner, Reddox, Stortini, Gagner/Nilsson/Cogliano, Pouliot. There are probably some adjustments that need to be made, but I think this list looks a lot closer to what I would expect a "difficulty of minutes" list to look like for the Edmonton Oilers after actually watching the games.
