Apr 8, 2017; Toronto, Ontario, CAN; Toronto Maple Leafs defenseman Jake Gardiner (51) and Toronto Maple Leafs goaltender Frederik Andersen (31) and Pittsburgh Penguins forward Sidney Crosby (87) watch a puck go wide of the net during the first period at the Air Canada Centre. Mandatory Credit: John E. Sokolowski-USA TODAY Sports

“He is an elite, number one defender”. “He is a mid pairing guy”. “The guy doesn’t deserve to be playing beer-league”. These are variations of comments we have all heard about the same person, Jake Gardiner.

How can one person be such an enigma and cause such chaos between Toronto Maple Leafs fans?

A few weeks ago I wrote about how I thought Morgan Reilly was misidentified by Leaf fans. But with Jake Gardiner, there is no agreed upon identity to misidentify. Therefore, I am going to try to properly identify Jake Gardiner so we can better judge his ability as a defenseman in the National Hockey League.

Before I begin, I’d like to come clean. I used to be the guy that thought we were better off selling him for prospects or picks because he was too much of a liability in the defensive zone. And why would we want a defenseman that can’t defend?(!) And now… I still think he is a liability in the defensive zone and is a defender that is not particularly good at defending. And I think we would be crazy to trade him. Wait, what?

In Gardiner’s Defense

We all know Jake Gardiner is a possession king and a God of the purely analytics group. We also know that he can often barely pass the eye-test. So why is he worth keeping? Easy, he tilts the ice.

How many times have you said a version of this, “Gardiner should have gotten that puck out of the zone”? Almost never. Gardiner may be a poor defender, but he turns the puck up ice and breaks out so well that he is playing in the offensive zone more often than not. And if you can get the puck out of your zone quickly and keep it in their zone (how many times has he Jake ‘N Baked on the blue line and kept the puck in) then there is much less of a need to be able to defend.

It really is this simple. Jake Gardiner is a poor defender and it doesn’t matter because if he spends much more of his time tilting the ice towards the O-Zone, and isn’t that the point of a defenseman? I’d rather that than an elite defenseman that doesn’t seem to play anywhere but in their own zone. What would be the point?

A defensemans job is not to stop pucks, that is why we have a goalie. A defensemans job is to turn the puck up ice and get it to the forwards. And there are not all that many players in the league that do it better than Jake Gardiner.