Quote:
Originally Posted by The Cobra
I thought their d was a mess going into this year, and look what Sutter did.
I expect he’ll manage again.
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On that note, I kind of wanted to highlight a bit about what he did last year, to
optimize his D pairs. Here are the 47 pairs that logged 550+ minutes together 5v5 score-and-venue-adjusted in 2021-22, sorted by expected goals percentage:
So for starters, you've got Kylington-Tanev as one of the top five pairs defensively at 1.98 xGA/60, allowing them to have a top five xGF% the seventh-best GF%. But far more interesting is the coaching side of it. This pair were doing what they did with
heavily defensive usage - 11.91 defensive zone starts/60 was actually the fourth-most
defensively utilized pair in the NHL last year. I don't know what people define "first" or "second" pairs by, but by every definition, this was a
shutdown defense pair, and one might argue that had they not both been hobbled in the playoffs, the outcome may have been different.
Next up you've got Hanifin-Andersson. They too were one of the top xGF% pairs in the league, although their per-60 GF/GA ratio was more riverboat-ey They were given more balanced usage - more neutral zone starts, but typically they were used indiscriminantly in every situation.
Finally, we actually had our third pair make the top ten of this list. What's interesting here is that our coach actually... coached. The third pair has some weaknesses... breakout passes, in particular. But Sutter really did shelter his third pair. Even though he was claiming that there was no third pair in the media, that isn't what his usage shows. Our "shutdown pair" (Kylington-Tanev) actually doubles the "big-and-mean pair" in defensive zone starts. The reduced amount of neutral zone starts for this pair is probably also indicative of keeping them away from the top lines in the league. He really just wrung the most out of this pair, because he leveraged his shutdown pair so well.
Of course, credit goes to Zadorov-Gudbranson for performing. I'm not trying to take that credit away from them. But good coaches also know when a certain pair is or isn't going, and adjust the icetime accordingly. I doubt Sutter would have tossed Bartkowski-Engelland out there the way a certain someone did back in the 2017 playoffs
