Looking at the (incoming) top defensive D award's ambiguity

[boubabi 4,725]

Hellloooooooooooooooooooooooo VHL

 

It is your favorite pessimist French Canadian member. This is just a short rant about the new award called “top defensive D” or whatever. Due to the removal (finally) of the 2 most useless awards ever created (top sportsmanship and top leader), the BoG or the Blue Team or both decided to add a new award for most defensive D. The idea behind was that we base our decision on points to decide who wins the Labatt, and that defensive D wouldn’t be recognise for their “work”. I would totally agree on this…if this was real life. However, it isn’t. First of all, it’s not the Labatt winners were most often players with horrible defensive build (aka 99 scoring/passing and 40 defense), there is just no point to that. The D will likely perform better offensively if he’s better in his zone. So, if it was REALLY happening, like players with weak build would win the Labatt over more complete D (with more TPE), I would totally be in favor of that trophy…but that’s not the case. Secondly, have we figured what makes a defensive D in our sim engine? I mean, if points aren’t the go-to stats anymore for top D, what will we look at? Here’s my guess. We’ll look at…+/-, shots block, hits (I guess it was looked at for the Labatte as well) and that’s it? Okay, so if we look at those stats, what conclusion we come in. +/- are mostly a team stat and it doesn’t indicate if you are a defensive liability or not (since you are on the ice 50% of the time) and looking at that stats would highly favor winning teams. Shots block….it’s the opposite. If your team sucks, you’ll likely receive more shots, plus, you’ll likely have the puck less often. This is not just speculation, it’s been proven for 59 seasons that weak team’s D will get tons of block shots, and not much for top team’s D. Then, this stat favor the other side of the spectrum, the D in sucky teams. The last one is hits, which is pretty straight forward. The highest your checking attribute is, the more hit you’ll likely get. However, we could agree that D’s in teams that suck is also a little bit favored, considered they have more hits opportunity. Considering we don’t have the takeaway/giveaway stats, there’s not much info we could use to name a winner.

 

I could easily take a look at past season and try to see what would have been the top D winner, but that’s just a xm radio and not a media spot, so fuck that. I’m sure that could be an interesting discussion in the BoG. However, if I’m missing something on that award, let me know. I’m curious to see how this award will be evaluated this upcoming offseason.

[Tyler 881]

who gives a shit

[boubabi 4,725]

Not you I guess