Seider's Historic D-Zone Usage

After showcasing how much the Wings’ have leaned on their top pair of late last week, I wanted to take a step further and see how Moritz’s Seider defensive zone usage compares historically to other #1 defensemen.

I took all defensemen since 2007-2008 who have played >500 5v5 minutes with a team in a season and then ranked the defensemen on each team by percentage of available minutes played to determine “defenseman rank” on each team. From there, I plotted the percentage of shifts (all situations) that start in the offensive zone vs. the defensive zone for each team’s #1 defenseman.

Historically speaking, only Andy Greene in New Jersey (2015-2017), Tyler Myers in Buffalo (2014-2015), and Vladislav Gavrikov in Columbus (2022-2023) started a higher percentage of their shifts in the defensive zone than Seider this season.

In contrast, three of this year’s Norris Trophy favorites are Cale Makar, Evan Bouchard, and Quinn Hughes. You can see there’s a stark contrast in how these players are deployed by their teams, receiving substantially more offensive zone starts, and in Hughes’ case, less than 10% of his starts in the defensive zone. Makar’s on pace to start nearly a quarter of his shifts in the offensive zone, a mark that’s not been approached in the analytics era.

When we think about metrics like Expected Goals For% and Corsi For% and consider that shifts are about 40-50 seconds in length for these defenseman, Seider’s definitely starting at a significant disadvantage when it comes to generating offense and suppressing shots against. Models do attempt to account for this context, but I am left wondering if the shift-based nature of hockey allows for this to be fully captured and contextualized with the data we currently have available for public use.

If you’d like to contribute to my work, please instead consider donating to my 1-year-old nephew’s heart transplant fundraiser as he currently is awaiting a heart transplant.

A New Heart For Baby Taru