Evolution of the NHL Defenceman - Part 10

Each week for the last nine weeks, there has been a breakdown in some aspect of how defencemen have changed their playstyle over the last two decades. There was a lot involved:

·         The increases in shot volume and assist rate at 5-on-5 are notable.

·         The increase in goal scoring was covered, but beyond that, how it’s getting harder for blue liners with limited goal-scoring ability to not only score, but stay in the league at all.

·         How there was a surge in defencemen jumping into the offence on the penalty kill late in the 2010s, but that has been steadily declining for several years.

·         Playmaking from the back end, whether evaluating by assists or tracking data, has been consistently rising for nearly a decade.

·         Defencemen have actually been less responsible for exiting their defensive zone with possession with each passing season over the last 10 years, but teams whose defencemen do it well tend to find more success.

·         Blue liners have been shooting more, and teams whose defencemen take a big chunk of their shots tend to out-perform those who don’t, but the impact is a bit more mixed than what we just saw with zone exits.

·         There is a good argument that bad offensive defencemen who are good defensively do more harm to their teams than good offensive defencemen who are bad defensively.

·         There are notable concrete examples of bad offensive defencemen who are very good defensively hurting their teams.

·         The biggest changes to defencemen on the power play came from the abandonment of 3-forward/2-defencemen setups and teams just generally being much better at converting on the man advantage. Blue liners started getting much more involved in their team’s PP scoring in the mid-2010s, and that has been relatively unchanged since.

There is a lot to take in but considering just how much the position has changed over the last 20 years, and even just the last 10, it is worth venturing to see how things used to be, how things are now, the size of those changes, and whether they’re actually helping our hurting their teams. Hopefully, this series has done that.

Any professional sport is a sport of adjustments. Teams play a certain way, their opponents start game-planning for that style, so then teams change how they play, and then their opponents re-adjust, and ‘round and ‘round we go. To say that how defencemen have played over the last five years, or just in 2025-26, will be the same way they play in 2026-27 is almost certainly wrong; we just don’t know what the adjustments will be. An easy example of that is the penalty kill. As mentioned in that article linked earlier, defencemen got very involved in their respective team’s PK offence at the end of the last decade. But from a shooting perspective, that involvement has declined in five of the last six seasons, including each of the last three. They are scoring more, but it seems they’re much more selective of the risks they take. That has been an adjustment.

It does seem we’ve crossed a Rubicon, though. If we had just 3-4 seasons of data showing increased involvement by defencemen in a team’s offence, particularly at 5-on-5, it would be easy to shrug off as a short-term change in playstyle that does not represent what the next five years will look like. That isn’t the case, though. These changes have been consistent since the late 2000s, and if we use our earliest available tracking data (since 2016-17 from All Three Zones), it is the same story. Not everything shows that – we saw how more zone exits are going to forwards as defencemen improved their offensive-zone playmaking – but the general trend has been for blue liners to get more involved in their team’s offence with each passing season. Maybe that long-term trend reverses itself in the next few years, but it’s hard to imagine why it would.

The last point to make is that it doesn’t mean that every defenceman on a roster has to be great, or well-above-average in areas like transition or goal-scoring or anything of the sort. As analyst Chris Watkins has pointed out several times, a group of defencemen is a weak-link group. That means its strength comes from a player, or players, not being awful rather than all of them being good-to-great. Remember in the movie ‘Moneyball’ when Billy Beane says he hates losing more than he wants to win? That is kind of the same thing for defencemen. NHL coaches and managers should dislike bad offensive blue liners more than they like good offensive blue liners.

We should also appreciate the era we’re in, too. The 2010s were littered with great defencemen and (potential) future Hall of Famers like Zdeno Chara, Erik Karlsson, Brent Burns, Victor Hedman, P.K. Subban, Dustin Byfuglien, and Shea Weber. All great at their peaks, some are even still playing, but what they did was set the stage for what we’re seeing now. We have Cale Makar, Quinn Hughes, Adam Fox, Rasmus Dahlin, Zach Werenski, Moritz Seider, Evan Bouchard, Lane Hutson, Matthew Schaefer, Miro Heiskanen, Thomas Harley, Jake Sanderson, Josh Morrissey, and on the list goes. There are a dozen (or more) defencemen who, with a bit of luck, could be a Norris Trophy winner in 2027.

Thanks to everyone for reading this series. Hopefully it helped illuminate why the game is the way it is today, and why some players might have down years for reasons that have nothing to do with their personal performance. The 2026-27 season is just five weeks away, and it’s exciting to think about what this new generation of defencemen will do.