NHL Defensemen Shot Attempt Shares, The New Jersey Devils & Adam Larsson

This is not an attack on or a defence of the Hall-for-Larsson trade. Let me just say that off the top. I haven't come back from hockey blogger dead to lend my voice to that over-crowded discussion. Instead, I want to try and answer a question I've been thinking about since the trade happened.

Does the New Jersey Devils' System Hamper the Offensive Production of their Defensemen?

We know a few things about the Devils system already.

We know that they don't produce a lot of offence. In 2015-2016, they were dead-last in the NHL in Goals For per Game with 2.22.

We know they also run a pretty tight ship defensively. They were eighth in the league last year in Goals Against per Game with 2.46.

We also know that, to an extent, Adam Larsson was affected by this defence-first mentality. He was deployed with partner Andy Greene in a such a way that it's clear he was viewed by the organization as their best option to prevent goals in their own end. See the Player Usage Chart (courtesy of Hockey Abstract) below:

There's Larsson and Greene getting absolutely pounded with brutal zone starts, facing the toughest competition amongst defensemen. This also tells us that, among NJD defenders, Larsson and Greene were put in the most difficult position to score.

This is all for review purposes as it's been covered before here and there and everywhere since the trade. Woodguy over at his Woodblog wrote some essential reading on Larsson post-trade and I would strongly recommend it.

What I'm interested in is this: When the Devils were in the offensive zone, how did they use their defensemen?

Unfortunately, I don't have the time to watch a bunch of film and see exactly how the Devils mostly impotent attack set up in 2015-2016. Instead, I went ahead and calculated total individual shot attempts for/iCorsi for (5v5) for every team in 2015-2016 and then found the percentage of those shot attempts that were generated by defensemen.

What I wanted to find was a kind of statistical approximation for how much the puck is getting back to the point for each team at even-strength. By looking at the share of individual shot attempts that defenders are getting over the season for each team, I'm hoping we can get a picture of how involved their defensmen are strategically in the offensive attack overall.

Here's what I found (data courtesy of Puckalytics.com).

Team	PTS	GF/GP	GA/GP	Total iSAF (5v5)	Rank	Def. iSAF (5v5)	Rank	DEF iSAF% (5v5)	Rank
San Jose Sharks	98	2.89	2.52	3737	9	1573	1	42.09%	1
Ottawa Senators	85	2.8	2.94	3432	17	1394	2	40.62%	2
Arizona Coyotes	78	2.54	2.98	3291	25	1280	8	38.89%	3
Calgary Flames	77	2.79	3.13	3123	27	1190	15	38.10%	4
St. Louis Blues	107	2.67	2.4	3591	12	1360	4	37.87%	5
Philadelphia Flyers	96	2.57	2.56	3606	11	1265	9	35.08%	6
Carolina Hurricanes	86	2.39	2.7	3092	29	1084	23	35.06%	7
Edmonton Oilers	70	2.43	2.95	3478	15	1218	11	35.02%	8
Winnipeg Jets	78	2.59	2.88	3340	22	1162	18	34.79%	9
Pittsburgh Penguins	104	2.94	2.43	3815	6	1318	6	34.55%	10
Boston Bruins	93	2.88	2.78	3914	4	1351	5	34.52%	11
New York Islanders	100	2.77	2.57	3768	7	1300	7	34.50%	12
Montréal Canadiens	82	2.63	2.84	3437	16	1182	17	34.39%	13
Tampa Bay Lightning	97	2.73	2.41	3529	14	1190	14	33.72%	14
Colorado Avalanche	82	2.59	2.93	3414	18	1138	19	33.33%	15
New Jersey Devils	84	2.22	2.46	2584	30	849	30	32.86%	16
Toronto Maple Leafs	69	2.34	2.93	3371	20	1098	21	32.57%	17
Columbus Blue Jackets	76	2.6	3.02	3358	21	1091	22	32.49%	18
Minnesota Wild	87	2.6	2.49	3405	19	1102	20	32.36%	19
Los Angeles Kings	102	2.72	2.34	4282	1	1383	3	32.30%	20
Nashville Predators	96	2.73	2.6	3701	10	1183	16	31.96%	21
Vancouver Canucks	75	2.27	2.91	3283	26	1049	25	31.95%	22
Florida Panthers	103	2.83	2.44	3301	24	1046	26	31.69%	23
Washington Capitals	120	3.02	2.33	3756	8	1190	13	31.68%	24
Dallas Stars	109	3.23	2.78	4063	2	1263	10	31.09%	25
Chicago Blackhawks	103	2.85	2.52	3909	5	1205	12	30.83%	26
Buffalo Sabres	81	2.43	2.62	3105	28	946	28	30.47%	27
New York Rangers	101	2.84	2.62	3582	13	1041	27	29.06%	28
Anaheim Ducks	103	2.62	2.29	3918	3	1052	24	26.85%	29
Detroit Red Wings	93	2.55	2.67	3307	23	880	29	26.61%	30

The above table is sorted from highest to lowest defensive share of 5v5 iSAF (you can sort by other columns by clicking on the column title). Here we can see which teams' defenders are getting the puck on their stick the most in a situation that allows them to direct it towards the net (most likely the offensive zone). I've also included the total iSAF rank for each team and the total DEF iSAF rank as well.

Perhaps not surprisingly, New Jersey shows up dead last in each of the "total" categories. They attempted the least number of shots overall at even strength last year, and their defensemen also attempted the least number of shots of any defensive corps in the league. But the Devils' defenders' share (or percentage) of the shot attempts for the team overall was much closer to league average (which is 31.89%) at 32.86% (16th).

On the other hand, the Oilers defenders attempted a larger share of the team's shot attempts at 5v5 with 35.02% (8th most in the league). This might suggest that the Oilers system is getting their defensemen more involved in the play in the offensive zone.

Of interest: note the monster percentages for the San Jose Sharks and Ottawa Senators. I bet you can guess that it's Brent Burns and Erik Karlsson driving these iSAF shares up. Both these teams get the puck to their star D-man a ton in the offensive zone, and both of those players attempt shots like crazy.

Anyway, the above suggests to me that New Jersey's defensemen aren't being totally left out of the attack at 5v5, but their league-worst offense certainly can't be helping any of their players' scoring totals, position aside.

Will Larsson be in a Better Position to Contribute Offensively on the Oilers?

I think a lot of Larsson's trouble finding the scoresheet in New Jersey can be attributed to his tough "shutdown" deployment and the team's waffling attack.

But if DEF iSAF% is any indication of how much a given team's system involves their D when attacking, then these findings would suggest that Edmonton relies a little more (2.88%) on their defence in this way than the Devils—though the Devils are by no means cutting their D out in the offensive zone.

The Oilers as a whole generated a lot more offense than the Devils did in 2015-2016, and they did it by involving their defenders at least a little more in the attack. I imagine this will benefit Adam Larsson's scoring totals at least a little moving forward in Edmonton.

Defenseman IPP

Another thing I took a quick look at was the average defenseman IPP on both teams in 2015-2016 among players who played at least ten games. The league average for defenseman IPP is 31% and both teams D averages were below that. The Devils came in at 26.85% and the Oilers, at 26.76%.

Adam Larsson was second amongst defenders on the Devils with 31.7% (Severson was the best at 40.5%). Larsson's partner Greene was among the worst on the team at 18% which suggests to me that Larsson did the majority of the puck moving for the pairing (Larsson also started only 30% of 5v5 shifts in the OZ but finished 42.5% in the OZ, suggesting someone WAS in fact moving the puck on the pairing). The Oilers best defenseman IPP? It belongs to Oscar Klefbom. He was at a sexy 50% over the 30 games he played before getting injured.

It's not a stretch to imagine Larsson's scoring totals improving with Klefbom either.

A Final Thought...

I was reading Travis Yost's condemnation of the Hall trade on TSN and was intrigued by this bit after Yost's final chart:

"The troubling piece of it is that the tough zone start issue doesn’t seem to explain his poor impact on team goal-scoring rates. You can see that as his offensive zone start% climbs, the team’s goal differentials – both actual and expected – either stagnate or decline. That’s the discouraging piece of this."

I imagine the games in which Larsson received more than 55% OZ starts were few and far between, but Yost's article says they exist. I wonder what the circumstances were that saw Larsson see so much offensive zone time when, on average, he saw so little over the course of the season. Could the drop in goal differentials have something to to with QoT? Was Larsson baby sitting a lesser partner or forward line in these games, resulting in this strange drop in actual and expected goals?

I couldn't find any game logs with ZS% included. If you can, this might be worth looking into on an individual game basis.