How to identify shutdown defensemen in the NHL draft

It's not as straightforward as it might seem

There is lots of talk about the big, strong, intimidating, physical defensemen in the 2024 NHL Draft class. It sounds like Stian Solberg will go in the second half of the first round. Names like EJ Emery, Charlie Elick, and Spencer Gill populate the first two rounds of Bob McKenzie’s final draft rankings. Note: it’s not his ranking, it’s an average ranking of players based on McKenzie’s polls of 10 NHL scouts. Scouting reports for these guys read as you would expect reports of shutdown defensemen to read. Hard-hitting, defensively aware blueliners. Are these the right characteristics to seek when looking for the next generation of defensive all-stars?

The short answer is “maybe.” The longer answer starts here.

These dots are all the defensemen drafted between 2002 and 2015 who made the NHL and played during their prime years. The Y axis is Evolving Hockey’s expected goals above replacement (xGAR) model’s measure of a player’s defensive impact at even strength and on the penalty kill. As you can see, draft order does not have much of a relationship with defensive impact in the NHL.

For good measure, here is the same group of defensemen but just looking at their offensive impact. There isn’t much here, either, though there is a bit of a slope at the beginning of the draft. The gist of these charts is that amateur scouting departments, as a group, aren’t very good at ordering defense prospect talent, even when attempting to isolate just one side of the rink.

I wanted to see if the scouting reports of elite shutdown defensemen can tell us anything about how to find the next Nik Hjalmarsson. For reference, here is the top of the list of defensemen in Evolving Hockey’s database who played parts of their age-22-to-29 seasons during the fancy stats era. It’s sorted by cumulative expected goals above replacement. This screen shot plus the next 12 guys is the top five percent of all the player who meet these criteria. The elite shutdown blueliners of our time.

For my project, I compiled scouting reports from as many of these guys as I could. It’s pretty tough to get anything from before 2013 publicly and anything before 2010, period. I was able to find enough info on:

• Jonas Brodin

• Jaccob Slavin

• MacKenzie Weegar

• Colton Parayko

• Hampus Lindholm

• Adam Pelech

• Adam Larsson

• Ollie Maatta

• Dylan DeMelo

to satisfy my thirst for scouting reports. With my limitless ctl + C, ctl + V shortcuts and our trusted amateur scouting savant, Claude, I struck forth for the land of no shots and fewer goals.

I asked him to read the text of the scouting reports and tell me the major themes present in all of them. Here is how he responded.

Hmmmm. Competitiveness and physical assertion are definitely present in these reports. Despite scouts’ insistence on size predicting NHL defensive success, one of Claude’s observations is that many of these reports contained mention of a need to bulk up! Not all of these players are huge teenagers.

Another counterintuitive asset present in these reports is offensive ability and puckhandling. These guys are good at transitioning out of the zone and are often good playmakers and creators. Those don’t sound like shutdown defensemen to me.

For good measure, I asked Claude to consider the entire corpus as one item and just evaluate the different concepts based on word frequency. Then I asked him to weight each asset by how often it appears in the corpus.

Good skating is huge. That’s where scouts have been correct. It’s why prospects like Anton Silayev create such a Pavlovian response in evaluators. Big man skate good. There isn’t much in these profiles about hitting hard or playing very physically, though. Some of the players are big and strong, sure. But plenty of them still need to put on muscle mass.

We can sum up everything Claude gave a frequency score of seven and above: shutdown prospects are fantastic skaters who excel in transition, are intelligent and good at both ends of the ice. Some are big and some are small, but none of them profiles as the type of freight-train beefcake that scouts want to select in the teens this year.

Claude’s analysis jibes with my more manual (but unpublished) look at the profiles of mid-round star defensemen.

As you read about the 2024 NHL draft class, keep Claude’s classifications in mind. Don’t let scouts sway you with clips of big blueliners smashing smaller opponents with open-ice hits. Instead, look for intelligent, two-way transition monsters who can skate like the wind. If past results are anything, these are the types of players who will develop into the Chris Tanevs of the 2030s.

Hell, just read the scouting report about the undrafted Tanev himself and tell me, in the comments, what you see.