One of the things that we know about Mike Babcock is that he’s pretty obsessive when it comes to matching his defencemen with opposition forwards.



The NHL’s Slightly Better Data Era dates back to 2007-08, when Babcock was coaching the Detroit Red Wings and had Nick Lidstrom at his disposal but even after Lidstrom’s retirement, Babcock’s always been aggressive at matching certain defencemen against the opposition’s best players. Babcock doesn’t just find an edge with matchups though: he shelters those defencemen who he thinks need it even when they’re going up against the opposition’s best forwards.



The Maple Leafs basically used eight defencemen last year – Ron Hainsey, Jake Gardiner, Morgan Rielly, Nikita Zaitsev, Roman Polak, Connor Carrick, Andreas Borgman and Travis Dermott. Those defencemen had distinctly different profiles in terms of the percentage of their time on ice that they spent against the...