The Wings Are Asking A Lot Of Their Top Pair
The Wings Are Asking A Lot Of Their Top Pair
Over the last 15 games, the Wings have leaned heavily on the Moritz Seider-Jake Walman pairing. They’ve started 20% of their 5v5 shifts in the defensive zone compared to just 7% in the offensive zone.
Visually speaking, you can see that no other team has challenged one of their defensive pairs as much as the Wings have challenged Seider-Walman. Furthermore, Seider’s has spent 55% of his 5v5 minutes over the past 15 games with one of the following players on the ice (via NaturalStatTrick):
Connor McDavid
Nikita Kucherov
Mitch Marner
Jason Robertson
David Pastrnak
Sebastian Aho
Jack Hughes
Kirill Kaprizov
Sam Reinhart
Filip Forsberg
Travis Konecny
Tomas Hertl
Anze Kopitar
Phillip Danault
Frank Vatrano
Ultimately, there have been a lot of attempts to characterize minute difficulty over the years. I personally don’t think we have all the data available publicly to capture the full effect. My personal belief is closest to what Dom Luszczyszyn wrote a number of years ago when evaluating how Quality of Competition impacted results for a couple of Leafs’ defensemen.
With that being said, it’s clear that some minutes – for d-men at least – are in fact easier than others, with a range much larger than what’s been previously measured. How much easier it actually makes things is still left to be determined.
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.