Where Are the Waiver Claims?
As the regular season nears, teams are cutting down their rosters to get under the 23-man limit for their NHL squads. Many prospects are being sent back down to junior and minor league hockey for more seasoning, and some veterans who just can’t cut it anymore are being demoted to clear space for superior players. Yet occasionally players who are capable of performing at an NHL level get placed on waivers, exposing them to the entire league as a free addition for 24 hours. This week, a couple of players who fall under that last category successfully cleared waivers without a single team placing a claim. I’m going to look a little more closely at these two players to highlight what may have been missed opportunities for NHL teams to add talent for a low cost.
In today’s NHL I think fans and front office executives alike would admit that it is easier to evaluate forwards than defensemen. Especially at the top level, forwards produce a lot of points and make plays that are easy to notice. Defensemen, meanwhile, often become noticeable when they’re making mistakes. Therefore, a player who is strong defensively may be underrated if they aren’t putting up the points to match. Players who have fit this bill in the past include Anton Stralman and Niklas Hjalmarsson, although these two players now receive their justified praise.
In this piece I’m going to use an evaluation tool called a HERO chart. HERO (Horizontal Evaluative Rankings Optic) charts are fantastic at giving a quick overview of a player or a comparison between players. The chart takes data from a player’s last three seasons, with the most recent season the most heavily weighted, and displays it in a horizontal bar chart according to that particular statistic in relation to the entire league. There are lines which indicate certain benchmarks according to NHL roster construction: for defensemen, that means Top 2, Top 4 and Top 6, while for forwards, lines 1–4 are displayed. The longer (and bluer) the line, the better that given statistic is in relation to all other players in the league. You can access these charts here.
That may have been a bit confusing, so let’s take a look at a chart comparing Hjalmarsson and Stralman for a better understanding.
The first thing that should stick out to you is that Anton Stralman’s chart, aside from playmaking, is completely blue. As I’ve mentioned before, he’s a very good defenseman. Hjalmarsson’s isn’t quite as impressive, particularly in terms of point production. Stralman’s overall point production is toward the low end of Top 2 defensemen, which means that his points per 60 rate (how frequently he scores points when he is on the ice, a much better metric than raw point totals) puts him somewhere in the 50–60 ranking of all NHL defensemen. Hjalmarsson, meanwhile, is a low-end third-pairing level point producer, meaning his points per 60 rate is somewhere closer to 180th. Of course, Hjalmarsson isn’t known for scoring points or contributing offensively, but rather playing strong defense. Surely enough, if we take a look further down the chart we see that under “Shot Suppression”, determined by how many fewer shot attempts his team gives up when he is on the ice, the Chicago defenseman ranks in the top 10% of all blueliners in terms of suppressing shots (hovering over the bars on the website will show you the exact percentile). Stralman is also rated very favorably in terms of his defense. From looking at this chart, even if you had never heard of either player before, you now have a base structure to develop your player evaluation upon: Anton Stralman is an elite defenseman who favorably impacts shot totals both offensively and defensively, and scores goals at a top-pairing rate. Niklas Hjalmarsson, on the other hand, is subpar offensively but has a huge positive impact on his team’s defensive play.
Now that we’ve become familiar with reading HERO charts, let’s take a look at the aforementioned defensemen placed on waivers and some comparable NHL players.
The first player we’re going to look at is Zach Trotman. 2010’s Mr. Irrelevant (the last pick in the draft) is a 26 year old right-handed defenseman who came up through the Bruins’ system, playing 67 games over the past three seasons. When considering his stats it is important to remember that he has a small sample size. This means that his point production should be taken with a grain of salt. While the 1,909 shot attempts he has been on the ice for over his career at even strength can give us a solid enough frame of reference, only 82 goals have been scored for either team in that same time, meaning the shot-based stats are more reliable than the goal-based stats. With that said, here is how he compares to David Schlemko, a very solid defenseman who recently signed a four-year contract with the San Jose Sharks:
Considering the above caveat, Trotman seems to be a very slightly downgraded version of Schlemko in just about every aspect pictured here. Schlemko is a strong third pairing point producer while Trotman, mainly due to that incredibly low assists per 60 rate, grades out at basically seventh defensemen levels. Given the small sample size I would assume that number would increase to some extent, although for the sake of argument we’ll simply say that Trotman does not produce assists. When it comes to shot generation, both defensemen are among the top 60 in the entire league at contributing to their team’s offensive chances. Defensively, Schlemko has a definite advantage over Trotman, but the latter is still a completely viable second-pairing defensive option. Overall his impact on team shot attempts grades out very positively, putting him just on the cusp of breaking into Top 2 territory.
Schlemko himself has struggled to get consistent playing time over his career, but his recent performance indicates that he is a very strong defender and it earned him a contract where he will be paid $2.1 million a year to be a part of San Jose’s very deep blueline corps. Trotman was signed by possession juggernaut Los Angeles and has now been sent down to their AHL team. It’s hard to believe that for the cost of $650,000 for one season and no other assets, not a single team in the NHL wanted to add this player to its roster.
Our next player will be involved in a comparison that I’m sure will turn a few heads. Mark Barberio is a 26 year old left-handed defenseman who rose through the ranks of the Lightning organization before joining the Canadiens last year. Barberio has played nearly twice as much hockey at the NHL level as Trotman, so his numbers are a bit more solidified even though he has yet to be given a full-time roster position. In this HERO chart he is going to be compared to a player considered to be among the top 10 defensemen in the NHL, Ryan Suter:
One of the instant reactions to this may be that Ryan Suter faces tougher competition. I tend to think that argument is a bit overblown, much like the similar argument about defensive zone starts (about 55% of all shifts start on the fly anyway). Suter has played gargantuan minutes over the last three years, by far the most of any defenseman in the NHL, so it’s likely that he plays against a very wide range of talent. In fact, opponents that Suter has played against over the past three seasons have a Corsi For % of 50.38%, essentially indicating that on the whole he plays against league-average competition (as does pretty much every player).
Moving back to the comparison, we see that neither player is a particularly skilled point producer. Suter has never been known for putting up eye-popping numbers and Barberio’s production chart looks like a juiced up version of Trotman’s. When you look at the possession numbers, however, you see that both players basically grade out as the bare minimum for top pairing defensemen. Suter helps his team out a bit more offensively while Barberio has the edge defensively.
My argument here is not that Barberio and Suter are interchangeable players; Barberio most likely lacks the stamina and experience to play at that high of a level for 29 minutes a night. The point I want to make, rather, is that while Suter has an annual cap hit of $7.5 million and plays huge minutes in all situations, a player who has produced similar results in what is still a considerable chunk of ice time (2,035 minutes over the last three years) was passed on by all 30 NHL teams even though they could have had him for the next two seasons at a mere $750,000.
The risk involved with claiming each of these players is so incredibly small and the potential rewards are so high. It’s debatable whether these players should even be demoted from the teams they’re on, but the fact that teams with serious holes in their defenses — and there are quite a few teams who fit that bill — didn’t take a flyer on these guys is pretty incredible. During a part of the year when it’s very difficult to improve the makeup of a roster, a lot of teams just missed some freebies.
All data courtesy of corsica.hockey and puckalytics.com
