Revisiting the Wings D

Previous posts have discussed the implications of the free agency strike out, mainly that someone on the Wings will need to step up and perform in the 2nd pairing. One player who may have the tools to fill this role is Brendan Smith.
While his talent is undeniable, he has been driving fans and management crazy with his tendency for boneheaded turnovers. However, I would argue that young offensive defensemen have the hardest time adapting to the speed of the NHL. When Big E went down with an injury in March, it was Smith who stepped into the vacancy beside Kronwall and he seemed to have finally reached his potential. Despite passing the eyeball test I wanted to see how well he did in his short time as the #2 defenseman, in hopes he could continue the success with more responsibility next year. However, when observing his deployment numbers, there seemed to be no obvious change following Ericsson's injury. This led me to examine all of the remaining top 4 Dmen (Kronwall, Smith, DK, Quincey) and see how they filled Big E's massive shoes.

So for a refresher, here is the usage of all 5 of the aforementioned players during the regular season, the explanation for this graph is in my first post.

Now I reran the number to include only the games following Big E's injury on March 18th.

So the first obvious change was that Big E's minutes were split amongst all 4, with Kronwall and DK logging the most minutes. Now based only on the eye test it appeared that Smith had simply replaced Ericsson in logging the tough minutes. However, rather than immediately promoting Smith up to the tougher minutes Babcock found a middle ground. Smith saw tougher zone starts and tougher competition, but Kronwall's competition decreased to meet Smith halfway. As a result, DK and Quincey get a little better zone start but slightly tougher competition to make up for Kronwall coming back. Rather than a distinct first pair and second pair, Kronwall took most of the Dzone starts and the tougher competition was split amongst all 4. 

The encouraging news from this is that the Kronwall-Smith pair actually improved their Corsi%, leading me to believe Smith could serve well on the 2nd pair. The downside falls on the man we just resigned for 4+ million dollars. With a slightly tougher assignment, Quincey's Corsi dropped all the way to a pitiful 46.6%. This is not to say Quincey is useless, in an ideal world DK and Smith prove capable of holding down the 2nd pairing, allowing Quincey to act as a hybrid 4.5 Dman, getting easier minutes with Kindl. Yes most teams would prefer to not pay 6.5 million for the 3rd pair, but more and more evidence is mounting that Quincey is getting passed, or has already been passed on the depth chart as happened to Kindl last season.