Hockey is changing – and with teams placing more emphasis on analytics, the one-dimensional grinders are being replaced in favor of multi-skilled skaters

Roles in hockey are becoming an antiquated construct. Trying to assign exactly what a player should be doing at any given time, especially in a fluid sport like hockey, is often a trite ritual. As analysis dives deeper into what’s actually happening on the ice instead of what maybe should be happening, the concept of a player’s role at any given time is being thrown out the window.

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Smashing conventional wisdom is still often a slow exercise. Just ask stud Swedish defenseman Erik Karlsson. Routinely considered one of the best players in the game, Karlsson is dogged for his lack of defensive ability. In this case, one could argue that “defensive ability,” is whatever sportswriters decided didn’t look quite right.

Nobody knows this better than Brian Leetch, who shrugged critics of his defensive ability to win a Stanley Cup, a Conn Smythe Trophy and entry into the Hall of Fame. Leetch could easily be classified as an offensive defenseman who played a certain role on the New York Rangers for most of his career. However, when you look more closely at his game and the way the position evolved, that’s not quite the case.

“I think for years, [the position] was basically: defend in front of your net and move the puck up to the forwards, provide that layer of defensive that the position’s name calls for,” Leetch said. “But I think when you saw Doug Harvey and Harry Howell, then obviously when Bobby Orr came and changed the whole dynamic of what a defenseman could contribute, it’s completely changed since that time.”

Leetch has watched Karlsson play. Really watched Karlsson play. He doesn’t see a defensively deficient player. H sees exactly what a guy like Karlsson brings to his team, and just because players can rain a deluge of points all over the scoresheet, it doesn’t mean he’s not playing defense.

“Any time a guy puts up a lot of points from the backline, that’s the first thing that people point to. But it you watch him play, look at the minutes that he’s playing and the amount of time he has that puck on his stick and makes the right decision and makes the right play,” Leetch said.

“It’s a game of mistakes. Something’s going to go wrong out there and that goes for every player,” he continued. “But the amount of things [Karlsson] does right and the amount of things he does to impact his team in a positive way is ideal. That is just such an easy thing to say about someone that’s putting up offensive numbers, but when you watch him play on a regular basis, everything he does is what any team wants a defenseman to do.”

So what’s the ideal defenseman? Is it a guy that just defends well? According to Leetch, teams are always looking teams are always looking for that “big, mobile guy,” but often the offensive ability to progress play, especially with how the game is going, is more important.

“The guy that can really skate, that can get body position, that can get the puck quickly, make the good first pass or make the decision, is able to beat a guy and get the transition going, seems to be the way the game is evolving,” he said. “The big, mobile guy is always the one everybody prefers – but I think more importantly is that quickness and the first pass, and being able to beat a player and be up ice.”

It’s not just Karlsson or even the position of defenseman in the league. Player’s roles are starting to blend together, because it’s a five-player game. Coaches preach it all the time, but it seems to fall on deaf ears. Every play on the ice includes all five skaters – it’s simply how the sport is now played. A hockey play isn’t a jar of immiscible liquids with each part being visible and separate, but rather a mishmash of players sliding in and out of different roles.

“The game is always changing. I think there’s such an emphasis on five-man play right now,” Leetch said. “I think that’s the way the game should be played. The defensemen need as much help from the forwards, and the forwards need as much help from the defensemen to be effective.

“You see a lot of that emphasis now: quick transitions, up ice, trying to outnumber the opposition. Teams like Chicago and Detroit have really put emphasis on puck possession and controlling the play. Their belief is: the more you have the puck, the more opportunities you’ll generate, the less the other team will.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Blackhawks, pictured here against the Wild in an outdoor game at Coors Light Stadium, have placed more emphasis on controlling the puck. Photograph: Brace Hemmelgarn/USA Today Sports

Not all teams can play this way, of course. Some, due to antiquated thinking in their signings – like picking one-dimensional players for specific roles – or maybe employing aging, slower players, are forced to adjust their strategy.

“Some teams are forced to get it in deeper and have bigger forwards, and are trying to wear the other team down and forcing them into mistakes, but the majority of teams are trying to play fast and with five-man units being involved all the time,” Leetch noted.

It’s not simply the media that’s dragging behind either. Change in conventional thinking has been difficult for NHL teams too. Take the Rangers. Their penalty kill has been brutal this season. It’s been one of the worst in the league and simply not getting any better. So what do they do? Go out and sign a guy that’s thought of as a penalty killer. They signed Daniel Paille, and just a month later, he’s back to the minor leagues, where the team originally plucked him from.

The Rangers learned what a lot of other teams probably supposed: Paille is not longer an NHL-level player. In the past, he was a fourth-line player for some pretty good Boston Bruins teams – one that was good enough to capture a Stanley Cup – but at his best, it was simply that he was a better hockey player than others on the fourth line.

There’s different ways to utilize a bottom line in the NHL, but it should never be filled with role players. Being a role player in a sport like hockey is code for: “good at one thing.” Being a one-dimensional player is simply no longer good enough for a contending team – and teams are starting to catch on.

This is at least due in part, to the construction of analytics departments. It’s really no longer a matter of if a team has an analytics department, but rather how much is being poured into that area.

Jennifer Lute Costella – co-founder of LCG Analytics, a sports analytics consulting firm – has seen the impact that analytics has had on these one-dimensional players.

“In my opinion, the move by some NHL teams toward more acceptance of and reliance on data and employing analysts to translate that data into information, has allowed those teams to move on from the traditional two scoring lines: a checking line and a ‘grinder’ line,” Costella said.

“The teams that were early adopters of this sort of analysis have developed three scoring lines and a ‘possession’ line approach to hockey,” she added. “It’s no longer good enough to let the fourth line grinders eat a few minutes of ice time. Now, that fourth line is often expected to be defensively skilled enough to match up against the opponent’s top scoring line, and strong enough to gain and maintain possession of the puck – even if they may not produce a ton of points from it.

“That, to me, has moved the needle on what a role player is in the modern game. Hitting and fighting are no longer going to cut it to keep a roster spot on these teams.”

There will always be players whose games are more suited to where they’ll spend most of their time on the ice. Leetch mentioned that just because Alexander Ovechkin, for example, is huge and strong in front of his own net, doesn’t mean he should play on the back end.

However, a changing game, and analytics changing the way we view the game, are certainly signaling a shift in what we consider a player’s role to be on the ice. That shift is signaling the end of one-dimensional role players in hockey.