Originally Posted by Wolven
Still wrong.
He's been playing 1st pair minutes for ~5 seasons now. His biggest average TOI season was actually 2022-23 with all of Hanifin, Weegar, Tanev, Zadorov and that season he put up 11 more points than Hanifin (top D points and #6 on the roster). The team (and a couple of players in particular) were not having a good season but Andersson was.
Anyway, +/- is still a garbage stat that weak analysis comes from. If you want to use it as an indicator, sure, but then you have to dig deeper to understand and try to draw conclusions.
If you dig into it at all... Andersson's +/- largely comes down to baring the brunt of playing a shutdown role against other team's top lines with very little support. The forwards he has the largest shared TOI with are Backlund and Coleman and both of their scoring took a step back this year while the group of them were being deployed against the other team's top lines.
Also, when you look at his fancy stats, this last season was a massive departure from the rest of his career for starts. Andersson was not getting offensive zone starts anymore and instead was getting a pile of defensive zone starts. So not only are they playing against the other team's top lines but they are doing so in the defensive zone.
Simply put: Playing a shutdown role with a shutdown line on a low scoring team is not going to help your +/- stat. When the team got punished in games, Andersson would take the brunt of it in this one silly stat.
Oct 28 @VGK, -3 (L 5-0)
Dec 8 @DAL, -4 (L 6-2)
Feb 4 @TOR, -3 (L 6-3)
...
Dude was a punching bag that the Flames threw out to get beat on by the best scorers in the NHL with a very green D partner. When the team needed to tighten up the bench, Andersson just kept putting up bigger minutes.
28 minutes against the Sens
27 minutes against the Bruins, Wild, NYI, 'Canes
26 minutes against Canucks, NYI, Sabres, Blues, Avs
In the end, no, Andersson is not elite. He is a 28 year old top pair RHS defender who is on an amazing one year contract, can be extended for 8 more years. About 7 or 8 teams need this asset and only one is available.
Trying to pretend that he is less than that just makes one look foolish.
|