New Way to Look at Red Wing Defenders

          In the first entry I looked at how the Red Wing defenders faired relative to an average 1st, 2nd, or 3rd pairing defender. The trouble with this approach is although we can directly compare CF%, there is the inevitable difficulty of assigning weight to a players zone start percentage, the competition they play against, as well as the teammates they play with. While we can eyeball the comparison we are allowing more biases to cloud our judgment. 

         Luckily while wandering the internet, I came across dCorsi.
Created by @SteveBurtch, he uses a regression model to take into account the factors I have listed above and create an expected Corsi value based on each player's situation. Comparing the true Corsi with the expected value we get a dCorsi value, in essence how much better someone does than is expected of them. While by no means a perfect statistic, it can help to show exactly how the Wing’s defenders are doing based on the assignments given to them by Babcock. 

First up is Niklas Kronwall. As the number one Dman for the Wings he has seen some troubling times since taking over a larger role due to the decline and retirement of The Perfect Human. This season he was finally able to post a positive dCorsi of .367, agreeing with my past assessment that he is doing his job and staying above water in the tough assignments.

Similarly, Ericsson has also seen a decline in dCorsi as he has quickly vaulted from 3rd pairing duty in 11-12 to being an anchor on the top pair. He did see some improvement this season ending with a -.240 compared to -.624 the year prior. Hopefully the injury played a small part in his negative rating and he will improve again this upcoming season.

Now we start to see why the Wings were so invested in attaining a top 4 defenseman this offseason. The first of our 3 potential 2nd pairing Dmen was the rookie from Western Michigan. After asserting himself so well in limited time last season, Babcock threw DK him into the preverbal deep end as only Kronwall and Ericsson received tougher assignments. Regardless, in this assignment the rookie struggled mightily, posting a -2.613 dCorsi rating. Things do not improve when we look at the man we recently resigned for over 4 million dollar, as Kyle Quincey was only able to put up a -1.976 dCoris rating.

While Kyle Quincey was able to provide a positive result playing in softer 3rd pairing minutes the previous season, you do not pay 4.25 million for a 3rd pairing Dman. Similarly, although Brendan Smith was able to post a 1.32 dCorsi, he did not face the more difficult assignments of Quincey or DK. (Although I would be interested to see a breakdown of his numbers as his season was a tale of two halves, beginning mostly in the 3rd pair before playing heavy minutes with Kronwall against the big boys.)

While Kindl and Lashoff remain a major problem, posting -.326 and -.786 dCorsi respectively, the major issue is the inability to bridge the gap between the top pair and the softer 3rd pairing minutes. While both Smith and Quincey are capable of dominating in softer minutes (I presume DK would succeed as well), for the Wings to be a true contender someone will need to step up and fill in behind the Swedes at the top of the order. 

All dCorsi information comes from https://public.tableausoftware.com/views/dCorsiForAgainstTot/Dashboard2?:embed=y&:display_count=no&:showVizHome=no