Claimed:Research Article: How Well Do Teams Who Spend The Most on Defensemen Do?

[Tagger 2,722]

Last week I wrote an article talking about the three things that I’m most interested to watch during the off-season and one of the things that I wrote about related to the Seattle Bears acquiring the free agency rights to two elite defensemen in Hamilton and Kyanon and how I wasn’t necessarily sure it was the best move. My reasoning behind that statement was that I felt that the teams that I had seen in the past focus a lot of their spending on defensemen wound up not being as competitive as many people thought, but upon further reflection, I realised that I was stating something as close to fact even though I had done limited research to make the point in that manner. So, what I decided to do was look into the matter for myself and see if I was correct in my assumptions that teams who spent the most on defense wound up struggling to compete as well as their team’s TPE count would indicate.

 

 

*To make it clear, I’m only going to be using teams that were at least looking to make it into the playoffs. Using teams that obviously weren’t going to try to win anyway would make the whole thing fairly pointless. Also, this will only cover from Season 35 onwards as, while I was able to grab the defensemen salaries for championship winning teams prior to the closure of the oldvhl.com site, I hadn’t gathered the data for teams who spent the most on defensemen*

 

Season 35 – Seattle Bears

 

Lineup

Forwards

Keiji Toriyama

Mikey Blade

Sebastian Ball Jr.

GIYGAS

Henrik Larsson

 

Defensemen

James Lefevre

Karsten Olsen

Zack Sound

Edwin Encarnacion

 

Goalie

Steven Smyl

 

Salary Spent on Defensemen: $12.9M

Percentage of Total Spending: 41%

Season Outcome: Missed Playoffs

Salary Spent on Defensemen by Champions (Meute): $8.75M

 

 

We kick this off with the team that I had the most reservations of adding to the article. While Seattle had a solid group of players, I think at the time they were probably considered a fringe playoff candidate at best, but looking at the fact that their TPE counts at the time were like those of the players on the Davos Dynamo (who did make the playoffs), that they had 70 points (which we have seen make playoffs in other years) and they had a .500 record against the EU Conference Champions (Titans) led me to believe that their inclusion in this article wouldn’t be a bad thing. With three of the top eight defensemen in the VHL on their roster, you would have thought that teams might have found it more difficult to shoot against the Bears than it was, as the Bears allowed the fifth most shots in the league. That combined with an expectedly underwhelming performance across the season from rookie goalie Steven Smyl (ninth in save percentage) and a low shot count (at least seven shots per game less than all the teams who made the playoffs) saw the Bears miss the playoffs by a rather comfortable margin in the end. The championship winning Meute team that season used a two defensemen strategy rarely used in the current VHL, but was most recently used successfully by the S51 championship winning Reign side.

 

Season 36 – HC Davos Dynamo

 

Lineup

Forwards

Sergey Brovalenko

Davey Jones

Odin Tordahl

Matteo Gallo

Jarkko Olsen

Thomas Landry

 

Defensemen

Matt Bentley

Shane Baker

Mario Linguini

Lars Lessio

 

Goalie

Lennox Moher

 

Salary Spent on Defensemen: $10.5M

Percentage of Total Spending: 33%

Season Outcome: VHL Champions

 

 

Just as a side note, this was one of the more difficult seasons to track defensemen spending as, somewhat bizarrely, the financier at the time (CowboyInAmerica) must have gotten muddled with the salary cap rules for traded players, as they were all the wrong way around. So, for example Edwin Encarnacion was traded from the Bears to the Express, but he’d have the Bears paying most the salary.

 

 

Our first example of a team to spend the most money in the VHL on defensemen but still win the championship, the Dynamo managed to win the Continental Cup despite being listed as having the joint-fifth best overall rating in the VHL. One of the factors that allowed them to spend as much as they did on their defensemen was their young roster, with five of their players still on their initial rookie contracts. Unlike most teams that spend the most in the VHL on their defensemen, the Dynamo didn’t really have an elite defenseman as, while Matt Bentley would go on to have a Hall of Fame career, he was only seventh in overall rating for a defenseman at this point of his career. The big risk that Davos took in their run to the championship was sticking with second year player Lennox Moher as their starting goalie, however the young goalie held his own in the playoffs and put in comparable performances to some of the league’s best goalies in Skylar Rift and Remy Lebeau when it mattered.

 

Next time, I'll be looking at Seasons 37, 38 and 39.

 

Edited November 22, 2016 by YEAH!stlemania

[Victor 10,943]

Good stuf, it was an interesting point when you just made it an off hand post .

 

Surprised my Davos features actually, as I am definitely a firm believer in forwards being more important than defencemen in the VHL.

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3 hours ago, Victor said:

Surprised my Davos features actually, as I am definitely a firm believer in forwards being more important than defencemen in the VHL.

I was surprised as well when I saw some of the names of the defensemen, but your team was kind of unique for this series in that your defensemen were earning more than their minimums (or at least according to what CIA had their minimums as). That could be another series to run actually after this one: How many teams who paid bonuses to their players have won the Continental Cup.

[JardyB10 4,865]

I'm also interested in this series for the same feelings Victor has for defencemen. I generally find them less important. That being said, we did almost lose to Cologne in the playoffs due to our shortage in defencemen, as two separate RIG Ds were getting 18 minutes a game, and were consistently minus players. So I'd say you need more depth than talent on defence.

[Guest]

Approved, can't wait to see the next 3 seasons!

 

One note that's just me: I have never liked centered body text. IDK what it is. Feels weird. Feel free to ignore it.

[Kendrick 4,741]

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