Chicago recently traded Patrick Sharp and good defensive prospect Stephen Johns to Dallas for Trevor Daley, Ryan Garbutt, and (most important here) cap relief.

This was a necessary move for Stan Bowman, obviously, but one that leaves a lot of questions, not the least of which are, “Why does Dallas feel as though it needs another forward?” and “Seriously, shouldn't Jim Nill be trying to get some help on defense?”

It also leads one to wonder what Bowman sees in Daley. He had to take bodies back, of course, and even with Dallas retaining some of Garbutt's salary, the Stars were probably happy to rid themselves of their long-time defenseman. Daley has a reputation as being a very good defenseman, but he's coming off a deeply awful season. And now that he's 31 (and will turn 32 in October), there are legitimate questions as to whether the Daley of last season — who, again, is bad — is the Daley we can also expect going forward. Most players do not get better after their 30th birthday, and there's plenty of data to suggest that's especially true of defensemen in particular.

In reality, though, Daley has obviously always been better than above-average defensemen in this league, so a slide from “good” to what he was last year (below-average in a lot of areas) is a worrisome drop to say the least. Now, that comes with the understanding that Daley actually posted career highs in both goals and points last year (16-22-38), both by fairly large margins, and in only 68 games so perhaps Bowman is banking on him being able to continue putting up those numbers when he gets onto what is clearly a better overall team. If, for instance, you stick him with Niklas Hjalmarsson and he gets a lot of ice time with Patrick Kane, that's likely to produce similar results than even time with Alex Goligoski, Jamie Benn, and Cody Eakin, who were Daley's three most common teammates last season.

It is, though, easy to be enamored of defensemen who post 38 points in 68 games. And not that Bowman hasn't managed his team exceptionally in recent years, but those numbers do make it easy to overlook another thing that helps boost your goal totals: Posting the highest shooting percentage of an 11-year career by almost 70 percent.

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However, we're also talking about a guy who's going to spend all but four or five days of the season as a 32-year-old, meaning that he's getting to the age when the wheels for defensemen tend to just fall off. Kevin Bieksa is a guy who gets talked about a lot when it comes to this sort of thing, because he's a defenseman who went from being just a step below Norris-caliber to getting run over in the playoffs by the Calgary Flames in about two and a half seasons. Those seasons were his age-31 through 33 years, and that's no coincidence. It's not hard to see Daley — who never approached Norris quality but was often reliably good and occasionally very good — falling into that same category.

No surprise, either, that age 32 or so is about when you start see defensemen dropping out of the league like crazy. What the chart below means is that from 2007-08 until this past season, 223 defensemen played in this league as 24-year-olds, and so on. Those numbers also include those who made as little as one appearance at a given age.



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