The surprise best defensive d-man on the Edmonton Oilers this year?

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The best defensive defenseman on the Edmonton Oilers this year comes as a surprise.

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His name? Cody Ceci.

I certainly never saw thios coming. Actually, I had no idea how Ceci would perform in Edmonton. I had not put in the long hours at the arena and/or in video review to know anything much about the former-Pittsbugh/Toronto/Ottawa with any certainty.

But having seen numerous veteran d-men come here on big money contracts and commence to struggle (Kurtis Foster, Mark Fayne, Andrew Ference, Nikita Nikitin), I feared the worst.

That fear was compounded by negative reports out of Ottawa and Toronto on the player, though that concern was somewhat tempered by more positive reviews on Ceci’s 2020-21 season in Pittsburgh, where the folks who had seen him the most thought he’d played well .

notorious d

Without watching a defenseman closely, and without the ability to assess his defensive skills, it’s notoriously difficult to get a good read. This is why there’s more debate on their quality than there is with forwards.

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Offensive attributes are far easier to count up and assess than defensive merit. It’s easy to count goals and assists, as well as passes or shots into or in the slot.

As a result, folks who rely on on-ice numbers such as Corsi, Fenwick and xGoalsFor% to rate d-men often have, shall I say, interesting and novel views on the particular merits this or that d-man. We can generally tell from a d-man’s point totals over time if he’s a strong puck move, but on-ice numbers like Corsi give a confused picture of his defensive play from him, like the view from a car on a road engulfed with fog .

One more massive complication is that a d-man like Darnell Nurse who faces off regularly against the best opposing attackers in the NHL, the Johnny Gaudreaus and Jonthan Huberdeaus of the league, must be that much better a d-man than a third pairing player if Nurse is not going to leak a higher rate of Grade A shots and goals against. All of Nurse’s stats are impacted by his difficult quality of competition.

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NHL teams do their own video analysis of the individual actions of their players on defense to get a much better read of their true defensive talents. At the Cult of Hockey we do the same, doing video review of all Grade A shots for and against, looking for which players make major contributions and which make major mistakes.

This year, Cody Ceci hits the home run on the team for defense, giving that he has the lowest rate of major mistakes on Grade A shots against at even strength while at the same time he’s consistently faced off against the most difficult of competition.

The best public measure of quality of competition is PuckIQ’s measure of the percentage of time a player is out against elite competition. For regular Oilers d-men, Nurse faces elite players the most at even strength, 41.7 per cent of the time, with Ceci second, 37.6, Duncan Keith, 28.4, Evan Bouchard, 25.8, Tyson Barrie, 27.3, Kris Russell, 18.7, and Brett Kulak, 28.9.

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In that time, according to our video review and analysis, Ceci has made 1.29 major mistakes per 15 minutes of ES playing time (roughly one game of even strength ice time), with the next least mistake prone regular d-man being Kris Russell, 1.5 per game, then Tyson Barrie, 1.67, Bouchard, 1.73, Nurse, 1.77, Keith, 1.77, and Kulak, 1.94.

It’s crucial to put Nurse’s middle-of-the-pack rate here in the context of the opposition he faces. Again, it’s one thing to face off regularly against Johnny Gaudreau and another to face off against Brett Ritchie. But this same context also speaks well of Ceci.

Bad Mistakes? Ceci? not so much

Ceci also makes a low rate of the worst kind of defensive miscues, the ones most likely to end up in the most dangerous Grade A shots against, the 5-alarm blasts that go in more than 33 per cent of the time.

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Russell has made the lowest number of such bad mistakes — turnovers, bad line changes, bad pinches and allowing breakaways — but he’s also played against the least nasty competition this year of all regular Oilers d-men.

Russell is at 0.12 per 15 minutes even strength.

Ceci, facing such tough competition, has only made 0.25 per 15.

Evan Bouchard, who handles the puck so much and so well, has been more prone to this kind of bad mistake, 0.46 per 15. But Bouchard is a young NHLer. He will learn. He’ll cut down on such errors.

Bad Mistakes: Woody vs. Tipp

And speaking of cutting down on such bad mistakes, the Oilers as a team are now making fewer of them under Jay Woodcroft than they were under Dave Tippett.

In 44 games under Tipp, the Oil made 214 such bad mistakes, 4.9 per game. In 35 games under Woodcroft, 146 bad mistakes, 4.2 per game.

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It’s a significant decrease, though overall the Oilers are leaking almost the same number of Grade A shots against now as they did under Tippett. At that time, the Cult of Hockey wasn’t tracking the number of 5-alarm shots for and against the Oilers every game (we are now), but perhaps Edmonton has lowered it’s number of the most dangerous shot against under Woodcroft.

While Grade A shots against are pretty much the same rate under Tippett and Woodcroft, the Oilers have ramped up their offensive play considerably, getting one more Grade A shot per game on average.

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