Are Modern Defensemen Better Than VHL Legends?

[Alex 3,206]

After my article last week, and some further discussions, I came to the conclusion that there is a simple and objective way to rank defensemen across eras. It is simply to consider them all equal, while early season players did produce more (especially early in their career), there was less awards for defensemen at that time (it did also used to be more common for players to win 2-4 Labattes in a row and there were other awards that don’t exist anymore). With that being said, I decided to test this with the top 50 defensemen based off scoring, here’s what I found:

 

For career statistics I made the decision to use the same scoring as fantasy, which for defensemen is 3 points for a goal, 1.5 for a assist, 0.3 for a hit and shot blocked, and 0.2 for +/-. There was a couple interesting surprises here, as Hard Markinson @stz came in the number one spot, Brian Payne slotted in the number 3 spot thanks to having the most hits of every player assessed, lastly Sterling Labatte ended up 6^th, specifically due to their relatively poor defensive stats.

Statistical Leaders:

1.      Hard Markinson @STZ

2.      Skor McFleury @Alex

3.      Brian Payne @Scurvy

4.      Alexander Valiq @Koradek

5.      Japinder Singh @8Ovechkin8

6.      Sterling Labatte @sterling

7.      Daniel Braxton @Jericho

8.      Jake Thunder @Thunder

9.      Condor Adrienne @OrbitingDeath

10. Battre Sandstrom @Acydburn

 

 

The other thing I had to consider was award wins and Continental Cups, this was the part that I struggled with scoring in this system. Eventually I settled on 100 points for a cup and 50 points for an individual award. This saw a couple players gain a lot of points and propel themselves up the rankings, specifically Condor Adrienne, who was 9^th statistically, but had a cup and 12 individual awards in their career. They were followed by Sterling Labatte and Phil Hampton.

Cup/Award Leaders:

1.      Condor Adrienne @OrbitingDeath

2.      Sterling Labatte @sterling

3.      Phil Hamilton @Phil

4.      Skor McFleury @Alex

5.      Jochen Walser

6.      Hari Singh Nalwa @Dil

7.      Elijah Incognito @Strummer

8.      Ryan Sullivan @Advantage

9.      Matt Bentley @Victor

10. Japinder Singh @8Ovechkin8

 

Overall, we had one interesting thing show up, players from before S59 (when defensemen awards expanded to include the Wylde) made up exactly half of the top 10 defensmen. The most notable thing here was that Ryan Sullivan, the player who was the number one defensemen in VSN’s top 75 ends up 10^th here and behind all of Sterling Labatte, Phil Hamilton, Japinder Singh, and Daniel Braxton, all of whom were included in and ranked below Sullivan in the top 75. The top 10 defensemen based on this scoring are:

1.      Sterling Labatte @sterling

2.      Condor Adrienne @OrbitingDeath

3.      Skor McFleury @Alex

4.      Phil Hamilton @Phil

5.      Hard Markinson @STZ

6.      Japinder Singh @8Ovechkin8

7.      Brian Payne @Scurvy

8.      Daniel Braxton @Jericho

9.      Jake Thunder @Thunder

10. Ryan Sullivan @Advantage

Honourable mentions: Pierre Emile Boucard @Gaikoku-hito (11^th), Hari Singh Nalwa @Dil (14^th), Alexander Valiq (15^th), Fabio Jokinen @jRuutu (17^th), Tui Sova @v.2 (18^th),
Battre Sandstrom @Acydburn (19^th), Jake Wylde @STZ (21^st)

 

I did have a few takeaways/questions I was left with after this experiment; 1) I do think the scoring used was fair, and seems to balance out across eras, 2) I do think that there’s an argument to be made that defensemen since S75 are some of the best the VHL has ever seen, and likely get ranked lower due to the legacy of those older players (like Valiq), 3) Players from earlier seasons typically won more awards, 4) Lastly, one thing I noticed is that the bar for getting in the HOF seems to have been way lower in the early seasons. Anyways, thank you for reading my rambling.

 

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