Last postseason, I was mad enough to double back and rewatch every single one of the 82 playoff games played for the purposes of a tracking project that we wound up running on this site.
The goal was to try and isolate the contributions of defencemen, specifically focusing on how they were uniquely able to impact the flow of transition at both ends of the ice. It’s a topic i’m deeply interested in, because of the clear gulf that still exists between how vital that particular area of the game is, and our ability to capture it with publicly available metrics.
There’s a lot of macro statistics that tell us how the team is performing with a particular player on the ice, but unlike with their forward counterparts, there’s fewer ways to capture what exactly defenders are doing to get to those re
