Defensemen in the M: Worth Their Weight in Gold

[Grape 676]

The VHLM has a pretty limited roster, and because of the relatively small population compared to the VHL, GMs need to be smart in assembling their roster. In this season alone, I have seen some errors in roster construction, which have led some teams to struggle, while other GMs expertly built a competitive team and excelled. A big area of importance I personally saw, from the draft onto the season, is defensemen. There is not a very large defense population in the VHLM, so teams that are able to focus on that, putting forwards on the backburner, will end up being successful. If you break down the league population and evenly distribute both forwards and defensemen amongst the teams, each team would be left with roughly 8.2 forwards, filling out approximately 68% of the forward roster spots, whereas there would be 3.2 defensemen per team, approximately 40% of the defensemen roster spots allowed in STHS. Even with a traditional hockey defensemen roster of 6 spots, the percentage would still be lower than the forward percentage, now being roughly 50%. It could be seen, from the draft, free agency, and the season as a whole, defensemen needed to be the priority over forwards. Saskatoon is a great example of this. In my analysis, they had the 9th ranked forward core, but the 2nd ranked defenseman core, finishing 5th in the league. Another example is the best team in the regular season, the Las Vegas Aces. Their forward core: 4th. Their defenseman core: 1st. So long as the population trends stay the same, teams should always be targeting defense over forwards until they are confident they have a competent defense roster.

[JCarson 723]

Article Review:  Interesting thought pattern here.  It would be interesting to see the statistics expanded to include the impact of TPA especially consideration the low TPA of VHLM players and the importance of defenseman increases. This type of analysis can help add depth to Gm skill within the league.  Great job on the article, it would be interesting to see the statistics expanded over a number of years, especially in a year that is defense heavy.

 

9/10 ranking for this article.  

[jacobcarson877 2,528]

I think it's interesting that with the same information we've come to slightly different conclusions. After the past 2 seasons of few D, we've seen 2 very different build strategies emerge. Either you load up on D at the beginning and fill out your roster afterwards, or you grab the best player available and fill in on D later. Both build styles have had exactly 2 teams per style make the finals these past 2 seasons. Ignoring the Ottawa outlier (due to some unfortunate rules interpretations), I think you're absolutely correct that deeper teams, especially on D, perform significantly better in the regular season. Which in my books does suggest that they are better teams (high sample size), however despite the efforts of the rules to enforce the opposite, it seems as though shallower teams are still able to continuously break through in the playoffs. I won't suggest this phenomena is restricted to the Eastern Conference, despite the fact that it has now happened there twice, but going into the playoffs I fully assumed Miami and Halifax would be the top 2 in the East in the playoffs, yet it was the Reapers that pulled through.

I guess Simon does what Simon does.

I applaud your continued efforts to try to understand it!

[Pifferfish 512]

On 10/24/2022 at 8:10 PM, jacobcarson877 said:

I think it's interesting that with the same information we've come to slightly different conclusions. After the past 2 seasons of few D, we've seen 2 very different build strategies emerge. Either you load up on D at the beginning and fill out your roster afterwards, or you grab the best player available and fill in on D later. Both build styles have had exactly 2 teams per style make the finals these past 2 seasons. Ignoring the Ottawa outlier (due to some unfortunate rules interpretations), I think you're absolutely correct that deeper teams, especially on D, perform significantly better in the regular season. Which in my books does suggest that they are better teams (high sample size), however despite the efforts of the rules to enforce the opposite, it seems as though shallower teams are still able to continuously break through in the playoffs. I won't suggest this phenomena is restricted to the Eastern Conference, despite the fact that it has now happened there twice, but going into the playoffs I fully assumed Miami and Halifax would be the top 2 in the East in the playoffs, yet it was the Reapers that pulled through.

I guess Simon does what Simon does.

I applaud your continued efforts to try to understand it!

Halifax lost key players heading into the postseason, they had 3 Dmen in the Reg and Added 2 just before the playoffs. Then they had to cut 2 and a forward.