In continuing with my previews of who I see as the 2013 NHL Awards nominees for the major hardware, I will be looking at who I see as Norris Trophy nominees. This trophy goes to the NHL’s “defenseman who demonstrates throughout the season the greatest all-around ability at the position”. In other words, this trophy goes to who is viewed as the best defenseman this year both in offensive production and defensive reliability.
There are many ways to look at this but there are a few things that I look for specifically:
- What kind of minutes did the player play? Avoiding difficult match-ups and being a power-play specialist aren’t hard minutes and really detracts from a player’s value.
- How did the team perform when the player was on the ice? Maybe a certain defenseman was great at moving the puck to his forwards but not so proficient in his own end and vice-versa. This has to be a complete player who logs a lot of minutes.
- I look at zone starts as a way of figuring out who coaches think are their reliable defensive defenseman. A defenseman has to worry about his own end first and if he can’t do that, he’s excluded from the conversation.
With all that being said, here’s who I have as the three Norris nominees in no particular order.
Nomination #1: Zdeno Chara (BOS)
The Henrik Lundqvist of defensemen, it seems like Zdeno Chara is just a perennial Norris contender and well he should be.
When it comes to scoring stats, it wasn’t an exceptional year for Chara. He averaged his lowest point-per-game mark (0.40) since 2001-2002, his first year as an Ottawa Senator. He finished with 19 points, tied for 39th in the NHL among defensemen with Patrick Wiercioch of Ottawa. His seven goals did tie him for 14th in NHL goal scoring for a defenseman, but in a shortened season, 22 D-men had between 6-8 goals, so sample size means that goal totals aren’t really a good way to differentiate defensemen. He also finished with a (+14) rating, tied for 15th among defensemen in this sense. You see he had a solid season but his numbers at face value don’t show us an exceptional season like he had last year.
So why is he a Norris nominee? Follow me down the rabbit hole…
Chara finished with a 14.21 On-Ice Corsi, good for 8th among NHL defensemen with at least 40 games played. Considering he finished last year with a 17.54 mark in 79 games (and his PDO wasn’t too different), it’s conceivable Chara would have gotten to over 25.00 On-Ice Corsi in a regular schedule this year.
Ok, you’re saying, he was 8th best, so what? Well figure that he was the 8th most effective defenseman in shot production/prevention in the NHL and he played by far the hardest minutes of any defenseman in the top-10 in On-Ice Corsi (his 1.207 Corsi Relative Quality of Competition is about 25% higher than Drew Doughty’s).
Finally, despite Chara being a defenseman who had scored double-digit goals in 8 of his last 10 seasons and cracked 40 points in eight straight seasons, his offensive zone start% was just 45.8% of the time. This means that as good as he is offensively, his coach relied on him defensively that much more.
Now, Chara is 36-years-old. He’s been in the league since 1997-1998 and these types of seasons like he just had are going to be rare, especially with the emergence of Dougie Hamilton. Chara’s power-play minutes have gone down for a two straight years now and his overall ice-time has gone down over three minutes a game since playing 27:58 in his first year in Boston. He’s undoubtedly slowing his game and managing himself but he’s still one of the dominant defensemen in the game today and this year showed us why.
Nomination #2: Drew Doughty (LAK)
This one might seem a little strange. Drew Doughty didn’t have a goal for the first two months of the season. His 22 points are solid, but it’s the lowest point-per-game mark he’s posted since his rookie year. He only finished with six goals but it’s pretty impressive when you figure he didn’t score in his first 28 games of the year. So what did he do that was so special?
You might even look at his On-Ice Corsi, a very good 14.84, and think that he wasn’t even the best defenseman on his team; Jake Muzzin finished with a 27.59 On-Ice Corsi in 45 games played, so he was way more important to the Kings’ success than Doughty was, right? Wrong.
Again, you have to look at a couple of other mitigating factors. Doughty played the fourth-most minutes of all players in the NHL at 26:24 per game, a full eight and a half minutes more than Muzzin. Not only that, but he played much tougher minutes as well. He played the toughest minutes of all regular Kings defensemen (Robyn Regehr was higher, but only played 12 games with the Kings). Not only that, but he played way tougher minutes than Muzzin did. So while Muzzin had a successful rookie season by all accounts, it wasn’t as impressive at it seemed, relatively speaking.
When you think that Doughty played the second-most minutes of any player in the Western Conference and that these were the toughest minutes on his team for most of the season, plus the fact that he had a higher On-Ice Corsi than another Norris favorite in Zdeno Chara while playing in probably the toughest division in the West this year, it’s hard to look elsewhere for a Norris candidate.
Nomination #3: François Beauchemin (ANA)
This third nomination could have gone a few ways but sometimes you just have to reward team success.
One of a few teams that would have been in line for a big regression had this been an 82-game schedule is Anaheim. Their possession numbers were not very solid, more in line with teams like Minnesota and Dallas than Chicago or St. Louis. Despite this over-achievement, the Ducks managed second place in the West and a division title, not a bad year.
At the core of this success was François Beauchemin. His 24 points in 48 games tied a career-high for points-per-game at 0.50 and his 0.13 goals-per-game mark was the second-highest of his career next to 0.2 in 2008-2009 when he only played 20 games. These 24 points tied him for 20th in scoring among NHL defensemen and his (+19) rating tied him for the highest mark among NHL defensemen with teammate Sheldon Souray. All in all, it was a career year for Beauchemin and the impressiveness didn’t stop there.
Beauchemin played by far the toughest minutes on a minus-possession team and managed to finish with an On-Ice Corsi of (-1.36). Just to tell you how impressive that is, consider the following: Alex Goligoski of Dallas played in the same division as Beauchemin, played only about six less seconds at 5 on 5 than Beauchemin and finished with about only 3 more shot attempts at the opposition’s net compared to his own, even though his minutes were less than half as hard as Beauchemin’s. So in other words, Beauchemin was just slightly less productive as one of the top defensemen on another team in his division despite playing much, much tougher minutes on a less-possessive team. That is how good he was this year.
Beauchemin led the Ducks’ defensemen with a .941 On-Ice SV%, which was also tied for third among all NHL defenseman who played at least 40 games. He also finished fourth in the NHL among defensemen with a 1050 PDO while playing for a minus-possession team which means that had this been an 82-game season, the regression would have kicked in and we wouldn’t be having this conversation. However, you can’t assume what would have happened; you can only analyze what did happen. And what did happen was Beauchemin was a major driving force for one of the top teams in the Western Conference.
My Pick: Drew Doughty
Doughty was the best player on one of the top teams in the NHL. He also played the toughest minutes on his team which happened to play in probably the toughest division in the toughest Conference. He also relatively outplayed the other contenders while logging many more minutes and logging them in all facets of the game. He is truly one of the top defensemen in the game at both ends of the ice.
Honorable Mentions
P.K. Subban did tie for the lead in NHL scoring but finished 35th in overall ice-time and didn’t play very tough minutes. Kris Letang tied with Subban in scoring, but having played only 35 games, I couldn’t really consider him. Would you vote for someone as a Norris contender who played less than 60 games in a normal season? Ryan Suter had a very good year but didn’t even play the toughest minutes among defensemen on his own team; that distinction goes to Jonas Brodin.
The nominees will be officially released by the NHL tomorrow, May 7th.
