In Part I, we looked at puck possession talents and tried to optimize line combinations for the top-9 group of forwards on the Flyers roster (click here to read Part I), now let's look at the defense.

I want to get right into CF and CA to try and get a better idea of where the talents lie as far as shot creation and suppression. Here's a chart of 2013-2014 results sorted by CF/60:

Not much of a surprise, except for maybe how close Luke Schenn is to Braydon Coburn in this regard. Also a bit surprised at how poorly Andrew MacDonald fares, but he spent three quarters of the season with the Islanders so there could be team issues at play, which we'll look at in a bit.

Now let's sort the chart by CA/60:

Clearly, Kimmo Timonen excels at both aspects of puck possession. Coburn is looking good at suppression, as is Mark Streit, which is a bit surprising.

Now, once again, like we did with the forwards in Part I, let's look at Quality of Teammate issues and see how each player fared looking at CF and CA versus their teammates CF and CA. These figures are weighted by time spent on ice together, so if a player outperformed their teammates in either suppression or generation, it's fairly safe to say that's a skill they have relative to the players they play with.

Timonen is just fantastic and irreplaceable at this point. A lot of people think of him as an offensive defenseman, but he actually outperformed his teammates in CorsiAgainst by a larger margin than he did with CorsiFor. Either way, Kimmo is an excellent shot creator and suppressor, and the Flyers are going to miss him dearly.

Coburn performed very well in shot suppression and just barely underperformed in creation by a little bit.

Mark Streit did very well in shot creation and outperformed his teammates by just a bit in shot suppression. Overall, he had quite a good season.

Grossmann underperformed in both aspects of possession by a substantial amount.

Luke Schenn did surprisingly well in shot creation but performed poorly in suppression. I'm not entirely sure what to make of this, but I bet it has to do with the neutral zone.

MacDonald was quite bad at shot suppression and exceptionally bad at shot creation. That is a bit surprising because he has some puck skills, but, again, it goes back to the neutral zone battle, where MacDonald notoriously struggles.

Michael Del Zotto, who played for the New York Rangers and the Nashville Predators, outperformed his teammates by a bit in shot creation, but did not do so well in suppression, thought he didn't do terribly bad.

Defense Pairings

Looking at what we learned about each player's strengths and weaknesses, I would probably have played Streit with Coburn, and Timonen with Luke Schenn, and rolled those two pairings out fairly similarly at even strength. The third pairing of MacDonald and Grossmann could be used more strategically at even strength, at with less overall TOI, to try and minimize their negative impacts.

But with the terrible news about Timonen, and the strong likelihood of him not playing this season, here's how I would construct the pairings:

Del Zotto - Coburn

Streit - Schenn

MacDonald - Grossmann

Coburn and Streit are your strongest defensemen at this point, and I think you need to split them up to try and make a top-4 than can handle minutes. Coburn and Del Zotto seem to suit each other quite nicely, as Del Zotto has a skill for creation and Coburn has a skill for suppression.

Streit carried Grossmann around all last season, and he managed quite well. I think he would do even better with Luke Schenn, who actually has the ability to add some shot creation.

Again, I would roll these two pairings out more or less with the same TOI and usage at even strength, and with the third pairing of MacDonald - Grossmann, I would just try to minimize their overall impact at even strength by deploying them strategically. One way to do that is to avoid potentially compounding bad situations of them being on the ice with weaker teammate forward lines, or against very good opponents.

Obviously there are a lot of different ways to try and set these defense pairings. The most likely group Berube will go with, in my opinion, is MacDonald - Coburn, Streit - Grossmann, Del Zotto - Schenn. The way I see it, that would be really hindering both Coburn and Streit, who are the guys you have to lean on now.

Quick Note on Del Zotto

I've done a good bit of looking into Michael Del Zotto, including who he was paired with in the past. In 2012-13, his most frequent partner was Girardi, who is a similar player to Grossmann and Schenn, except that he's better. Del Zotto did not fare very well with Girardi. He had a -3.7 relative CorsiFor% despite starting in the offensive zone 58% of the time.

In 2013-14 his most common role was on the 3rd pair with John Moore. MDZ had a -1.4 relative CorsiFor% despite over 60% offensive zone starts.

In his best full season, 2011-2012 when MDZ scored 41 points in 77 games, he had a -0.6 relative CorsiFor% in just 51.8% offense zone starts. Who was his partner during that season? You guessed it: Anton Stralman.

Here's a graph of Del Zotto's CF% WOWYs for his entire career. It helps to show what kind of effect he's had on his teammates:

He hangs right around the middle, which says to me that he's not a strong or weak possession player. What he seems like to me is a skilled guy who isn't strong enough to float a weaker player but won't drag down a good one either. That's why I think you can maximize his skill set by putting him with Coburn, who is now your best defenseman, a fact alone that still kind of blows my mind, as seen in this tweet from the other day:

I'm amazed this D that used to roll out Pronger/Carle and Timonen/Coburn back to back for 48 mins/game has been reduced to Coburn all alone — Bob Roberts (@BobRbrts) August 5, 2014

Data used in this post collected from extraskater.com and stats.hockeyanalysys.com