Lock up your young defensemen, NHL teams (Trending Topics)

The phrase that's probably been said more than any other in NHL circles over the years is, “He's a very underrated young defenseman.” 

Almost all young defensemen these days are underrated, it seems, and to that end they're also almost criminally underpaid.

Take, for example, the TJ Brodie contract signed earlier this week. Five years and $4.65 million per. It will take him from his age-25 season until he's almost 30 (he's a June 1990 birthdate, meaning he'll still be 24 when the Flames' season ends in April).

If he were being paid that much now, it would be a tremendous savings over his actual value. Speaking as someone who watches a lot of Flames games — for work reasons. I am not a masochist — I evaluate him as being just a smidge below his defensive partner, Mark Giordano, in terms of his ability to influence play.

Giordano was of course a very reasonable pick for the Norris last season despite missing about a quarter of the season, and probably would have won the thing if he hadn't. This is how highly I rate Brodie. And the numbers back that up: First read this from Travis Yost, then go here and filter for at least 1,200 minutes played. Brodie is first among all defensemen from 2002 to present in terms of relative fenwick. Giordano is sixth. Both play nails-tough minutes for a garbage team in an impossible division. 

Thus, given the fact that he's hardly a household name in the National Hockey League, it seems fair to also consider him underrated.

But with that having been said, the thing is that you can call lots of defensemen — and no-offense, defensive forwards for that matter — “underrated” when you watch them at least a few dozen times a year. Every team in the league, I'd suspect, have guys that fans and observers of that team would rate more highly than the rest of the hockey world simply because they see “the little things” in their game that don't show up in highlight reels.

This is especially true because, often, it's hard to find numbers that back up claims to the contrary. We have corsi, sure, but people still somehow don't trust it as a reasonable evaluator of overall play. They say it limits the ability to evaluate a player's individual defensive acumen. It's a team stat, it's biased toward highlighting offense, etc. To these players, too, the hockey world affixes the “underrated” moniker. The Flames basically made that argument when giving Deryk Engelland, who is demonstrably awful in most respects, three years at $2.9 million per. The Capitals likewise did the same when they committed to cutting Brooks Orpik five years worth of checks at $5.5 million per.

(This might, it seems, be primarily a “Penguins defense” thing.)

They said that what the numbers don't show — but what their own paid talent evaluators saw clearly — is a player of quality, who matches up against blah blah blah toughness blah blah blah.

And defense specifically is a position that remains somewhat poorly understood within the hockey world. People don't want to accept that what makes outfield players good, across the board, is an ability to keep the puck out of their own end specifically by driving it toward that of their opponents. Pretty simple, really, and yet here we are with a league full of “underrated defensemen” anyway.

The issue, then, is two-fold. First, we must consider what we value in defensemen in the game today. Ruggedness, for lack of a better word, is a holdover from ancient hockey days when you could water-ski behind any forward and not get called until you caught up and were able to board him. Orpik is rugged, Engelland is rugged. Dan Girardi is rugged. They also get killed in possession. The hockey world therefore needs to reframe the value of the ability to hit guys and block shots. They're not without value, of course, because some guys are good at both blocking shots and driving play forward when they have to; even the very best players in the league spend a good 40 percent of their time on ice in their own zones.

Therefore, what you want to do is find guys who minimize that own-zone time. Guys who get paid specifically because they are physical don't usually do that. Guys who can incorporate that into their overall games — Giordano, Zdeno Chara, Nicklas Kronwall, Victor Hedman, etc. — are consequently more valuable. You would describe them all as being “physical” defensemen, but not first and foremost when listing their positive attributes. Giordano, Chara, Kronwall, and Hedman are all properly-rated, obviously, as being clear No. 1 guys who are among the best in the league at what they do. They move play in the right direction to an extent that others cannot.

Of course, there's that kind of underrated defenseman out there, the category into which Brodie falls: mid-20s, top-pairing, low-scoring possession drivers. Also included in that group, probably, are Ryan McDonagh, Anton Stralman, Justin Faulk, Marc-Edouard Vlasic, Jonas Brodin, and Jake Muzzin. You can tell they're underrated because they're all signed to long-term deals in the $4 million-to-$5 million range. These are all very strong defensemen, underrated usually because there were bigger-name defensemen on their teams — this is the case for Muzzin (Drew Doughty), Brodin (Ryan Suter), Stralman (McDonagh), Vlasic (Dan Boyle), and Brodie (Giordano) — or they're a little too young to have really been around long enough to garner “Wow he's really good!” praise from national media outlets until more recently, like McDonagh and Faulk.

These are very good defensemen signed to great-value deals by teams that do, indeed, see them dominate opponents every day. But some aspect of their game might be lacking in one way or another that can serve to depress their perceived value. By signing long-term, they may be costing themselves some serious money, which is all the better for their teams.

This is where bridge contracts become so valuable for players, specifically. It allows them to get paid a little less than they're worth for a short while before cashing in during their prime years. By signing these middle-value long-term deals, they are effectively costing themselves an additional payday because they might be able to sign for bigger money both when they're, say, 25, and then again when they're 32 or so and still pretty effective.

PK Subban used this to great effect against the Habs, who were foolish to not give him the $5.5 million for five or six years he was rumored to have sought during his brief “holdout” (which, again, wasn't really a holdout in the traditional sense).

Thus we need to consider when defensemen move from under- to properly- to overrated, and what it is that makes them so. I would argue that while PK Subban is one of the three or five best defensemen in the league, he is still a little overpaid, and thus overrated to some extent, at a $9 million per year AAV (at least in the current NHL economy; three years from now he'll probably be paid properly). This is the risk teams run in fooling around with contracts for good young players.

Along similar lines, if Oliver Ekman-Larsson can spend two or three seasons being called “underrated” by everyone who watches more than two Coyotes games, can he really be considered such any more? What about when he pulls $5.5 million per for six years, which he did starting last year? That deal is a little bit reasonable now, and will be a clearance-basement bargain by the time it expires.

The point is that a lot of teams are now moving hard to tie down their good, young defensemen before everyone knows how good they are and start talking them up. That's exceedingly wise. By giving these long-term deals with a middling value, they are effectively locking in the prime years of a player's career at a team-friendly price before putting themselves in a position to either pay through the nose or not-pay for the player's decline years.

This is a rare case of GMs recognizing a market inefficiency before players do, and they're exploiting the hell out of it while they still can. Teams, slowly but surely, are starting to realize the value of these blue liners who don't put up a ton of points, don't play overly physical hockey, but do move the puck in the right direction consistently against just about everyone they face. They're making sure those players don't get lost in the free agent shuffle like they used to.

And right now those teams also realize they can underpay for them a little bit. But that also allows them to continue over-paying defensemen they shouldn't rate very highly at all. Some day soon, a GM who can pay everyone what they're worth is going to have the best team in the league by a mile.

Ryan Lambert is a Puck Daddy columnist. His email is here and his Twitter is here.

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