We’re going to take a crack at picking the best defensive player in the NHL each month. We’ll combine the efforts from the first two months of the season and tab Drew Doughty of the Los Angeles Kings as our inaugural selection.

Doughty, a second-team All-Star selection last season, makes sense as the choice on a couple of fronts.

He’s played the third-most minutes in the league (and an average of 27 minutes per game) for the team that entered the day with the fewest goals allowed in the NHL.

Doughty’s 5-on-5 on-ice Corsi differential (plus-143) is the best in the league. He has been on the ice for 481 Kings shots, shots that were wide, and shots that were blocked, while in that same time, opponents totaled only 338 such shot attempts.

Doughty also ranks as the NHL leader in defensive point shares, a stat Hockey-Reference.com tracks, based on how good a player is at preventing “marginal goals” adjusted to time on ice (last year’s leaders were P.K. Subban and Andrei Markov). Doughty finished seventh in that statistic last season.

Also notable from Hockey-Reference is that Doughty’s expected plus-minus, based on where shots were taken from when he was on the ice is 0.7. He’s a plus-8 for the season, so he may be overachieving in some ways.

Doughty is not a big-time shot-blocker. He’s on pace for 107 this season, which would be 37 fewer than he had last season. And he’s not a scorer (he has two goals in 23 games).

But he’s a difference-maker. In the Kings’ final game of the month against the the defending champion Chicago Blackhawks, Doughty played 29 minutes and 43 seconds. In that time, the Kings had 34 shot attempts. The Blackhawks had 10.

Other candidates were Seth Jones and Barret Jackman from the Nashville Predators and Victor Hedman of the Tampa Bay Lightning.

How would you go about selecting a defensive player of the month? Leave your thoughts in the comments.