from Travis Yost of TSN,

In terms of big unrestricted defencemen left, it’s about Jason Demers and Dan Hamhuis. That lack of depth is not going to stop teams from combing through the rest of the pool. After all, each team is going to carry seven or eight defenders, and most rosters right now need at least one extra body.

The question that generally comes up in these instances is really about differentiation. How can you spot a capable fifth defenceman and isolate him from a group of six or seventh defenders? It’s not an easy exercise – certainly not as easy as we have it with forwards, where individual point scoring can reasonably capture player talent by itself.

One of the things I use for differentiation purposes is the application of multi-year z-scores, which lets us grade defencemen against one another using multiple criteria. To me it’s a necessary exercise, particularly since our evaluation of defenders really does need to span multiple performance metrics.

Here, we will use z-scores to compare individual defencemen against all other league defenders another using six statistical measurements: team relative impacts (both for and against) on shot differential and goals, individual point scoring, and individual shot generation.

more