Today, let’s take a look at the defensive pairings on this team. They are each fairly unique, but how effective have they been?
As the New Jersey Devils struggle to find their game across a full 60 minutes, it is worth looking at different areas of the roster and seeing what is going on. Something has become flat or stale, or this team just cannot find the spark they had before Christmas. They have not been bad per se, taking 4 out of 6 points from TB, FLA, and TOR in their last three games. That is a quality outcome overall. But if you watched those games, you know that it could have been more, and the way they’ve played has felt inconsistent.
Yesterday, John talked about how the bottom 6 have really been struggling to generate goals, and it is hampering this offense. Today, I wanted to look at the defensive pairs. I don’t want to do it in the sense that they are generally struggling, this isn’t the same as the bottom 6. However, the defensive pairings have been static for a while and I want to see how these three pairings are working together.
First, here is some xG data from Natural Stat Trick about the defensive pairings, thanks to Natural Stat Trick. Rankings are for all pairs that have played at least 100 5v5 minutes together, of which exactly 200 qualified when I took these numbers yesterday.
These numbers might not surprise you and probably shouldn’t. They tell the story that we would generally expect from these pairings. Jonas Siegenthaler and Jonathan Kovacevic have been a very strong defensive pairing together. They are exceptional at preventing goals against, ranking 12th out of 200 pairings in terms of expected goals against per 60. They are not super talented offensively, both of them thriving more on their defensive games, but they are not dead weight offensively either, coming in at 99th out of 200 pairings in expected goals for per 60. This all equates to an overall xGF% of 57.62%, good for 24th. These two are a strong, quality pairing that does good defensive work for this Devils team without issue.
Brett Pesce and Luke Hughes are sort of the middle-ground pairing of these three. They are significantly better offensively thanks to Luke’s offensive talent than the first pairing, but they are not as dynamite with expected goals for as Dougie’s pairing is. However, they are also better than Dougie’s pairing defensively, significantly so. They rank 66th in expected goals against per 60 out of 200, not a bad place to be overall. They are not a pure shutdown pairing like Siegenthaler-Kovacevic, but they do quality work defensively overall. And when paired with their very strong offensive capabilities, they are a positive pair for this Devils team.
The pairing of Dougie Hamilton and Brendan Dillon is interesting. They are sort of the opposite of Siegenthaler and Kovacevic, but a little more extreme. Thanks mostly to Dougie, they are exceptional offensively, ranking 11th among pairings with 3.22 expected goals for per 60. That is dynamite. But defensively, they are basically a mess, allowing 2.61 expected goals against per 60, ranking 121st out of 200. That is poor. Now, it all comes together for a tidy 55.24% expected goals percentage, good for 42nd, so overall, it generally works. But defensively, this pairing is struggling somewhat.
Now, we expect Hamilton to be incredible with his offense, but perhaps not amazing defensively. He should not be bad, but his offense is where he truly shines. Dillon, however, is supposed to be the defensive specialist in this pair. He is the prototype defensive defenseman who should be backing up Dougie and keeping this pairing solid in terms of allowing goals against. But clearly, with these numbers, that is not the case. Here is his player card this year from Rono:
As you can see, he has been swiss cheese on defense. His offensive numbers are clearly bolstered by playing with Hamilton, but he needs to be good defensively to play with Hamilton, but he has been the exact opposite of that. He has been really bad on defense, and this is not good enough.
Moving forward, Dillon is going to need to do something to improve his game defensively if he wants to continue to play each night. The Devils have Simon Nemec just waiting in the wings to play, and he could assuredly play better defense with Hamilton than Dillon is right now. Dillon is potentially playing for a job as a starting defenseman right now, and he is not doing a good job.