The first impact move of the Daniel Briere era has been made. In a trade that somehow came from out of nowhere – despite the player in question being consistently part of trade rumors – the Flyers have shipped Ivan Provorov, 26, to the Columbus Blue Jackets (and Kevin Connauton) in a three-team deal (Los Angeles Kings, who also get Hayden Hodgson) that sees the Flyers gain goaltender Cal Petersen, 28, defenseman Sean Walker, 28, Los Angeles’ first round pick in 2023 and second round pick in the 2024 draft, prospect Helge Grans, 21, and a conditional second round pick from Columbus for either 2024 or 2025.
The Kings are also retaining a portion of Provorov’s salary, a generous move likely made to shed salary cap space.
Now, in the wake of this move, you may be asking yourself where the Flyers defensive core stands, which is a fair question. Below are all of the defensemen who are under contract with the Flyers for 2023-24:
Travis Sanheim, Rasmus Ristolainen, Tony Deangelo, Nick Seeler, Yegor Zamula, Adam Ginning, and the newly acquired Sean Walker.
There’s also Ronnie Attard and Cam York who are both restricted free agents, but there’s little doubt that the Flyers will sign both of them. Yet, even taking into account the addition of Attard and York, with the latter set to inherit a larger role on the ice, this is still a defensive depth chart with major questions looming over it, especially given the Flyers’ rebuilding status.
For starters, it seems as if the best parts of this defensive core, with Provorov now gone, are either not yet on the roster or are working to reach their potential. This may seem obvious, but let’s take a look and validate this statement analytically. I will be doing this using Point Shares, a statistic found on Hockey Reference (you can read from the link to find out more) that attempts to ascertain any individual player’s contribution to their team’s overall point standings.
Without diving into too much detail on how Point Shares are calculated, the statistic takes factors such as goals and shots created/against, along with league-wide performance, and weighs them to generate a score based on the player’s time on ice. This returns an approximation of the player’s value in terms of the standings points contributions. It is a good way of measuring player contributions in context of a team’s success.
Below are the point share totals for each Flyers’ defenseman for the 2022-23 season. For simplicity’s sake we will only look at total point shares rather than just offensive or defensive point shares.
In total, the Flyers’ defensemen put up 37.1 point shares.
To put this number into context, Erik Karlsson in 2022-23 put up 12.4 point shares on his own, likely thanks to his 100+ point resurgence to stardom in the NHL. Obviously the Flyers don’t have a player nearly in the same mold both skill and play-style wise as Karlsson (I’ll touch on this later), but even from a Flyers perspective, if we look at just the defensemen, they somehow put up a season with less point shares than 2021-22, where they gave up more goals (298 vs 277), and had an overall worse record.
In summary, they were very good at not helping the Flyers win games.
In fact, over the last five seasons, the highest individual point share put up by a defenseman was by Ivan Provorov himself, who put up 7.1 point shares in 2019-20. This was good enough to lead the Flyers, in fact, and Provorov even received Norris trophy votes that season. We are, of course, yet to see whether this will be the peak for Provorov, however it appears more than clear that the Flyers seem to think so.
Provorov’s strong 2019-2o campaign was, in the end, so bitterly disappointing as we reflect upon his departure due to the hope that the Flyers had finally found their so desired #1 defenseman. In the end, Provorov leaves having not fulfilled that role, and the new focus transitions into attempting to pinpoint which player, if any, can take that position and play to the level a #1 defenseman should.
Taking Provorov’s 7.1 Point Shares for the 2019-20 season into account, the past 5 Norris trophy winners, Cale Makar, Adam Fox, Roman Josi, Mark Giordano, and Victor Hedman, averaged 12.28 Point Shares (adjusted for games played due to COVID-19 shortened seasons). Roman Josi in particular even managed to put 13.9 Point Shares on the board, but was overshadowed by Makar’s outstanding 15.3 which led the entire NHL for 2021-22.
We, of course, take into account that the Flyers were bad in 2022-23. While it is true that better teams will have more point shares among their players, there still exists a trend among where the best defensemen sit in terms of point shares on a season by season basis in terms of them contributing to their team’s success. In this regard, we can use the statistic as a measuring stick, where good players will usually contribute larger percentages to their team’s point shares, as was the case with Dylan Larkin (for example) in 2022-23, who put up 8.0 point shares on a Red Wings team that missed the playoffs.
For fun, let’s narrow down to a case study of one player: Victor Hedman. Hedman is widely considered to be one of the best defensemen in the league, and has been for a while. If we take all of the seasons from when he first received Norris Trophy votes, that is to say from 2013-14 onward, his average point shares per season is 9.6. This, however, is unadjusted to account for injuries nor to account for the COVID impacted seasons.
But, to bring this discussion back to the topic at hand, the last time the Flyers had a defenseman put up a point share total equal to or higher than Victor Hedman’s average was a 9.8 achieved by Shayne Gostisbehere in 2017-18 when he finished 10th in Norris Trophy voting, now more than five seasons ago. Now, that isn’t to say Gostisbehere is some sort of revelation, even if the Flyers should have kept him instead of trading him for nothing. That 9.8 is by far his career best and over the last few seasons he’s average just over 6 win shares.
Alternatively, if you want to look at the last Flyer to hit Norris Trophy finalist level numbers, we’d have to go all the way back to 2009-10, when Chris Pronger put up a season totaling 11.4 point shares. Pronger regularly put up seasons with 10 or more point shares, however, he only did this once as a Flyer, due to the career ending injury he suffered in 2011 among other factors.
Sadly, the last Flyers’ defensemen to have sustained success even close to this level were Kim Johnsson, who put up seasons of 8.2, 8.9, and 9.2 point shares from 2001-02 to 2003-04, and Eric Desjardins, who averaged 9.23 point shares between 1995-96 and 2002-03 (in two of these seasons, he put up more than 10 point shares).
These types of point share totals are driven by elite defensemen, players who make it possible to content for Stanley Cups, and the Flyers haven’t had anyone of that calibre for more than a decade now. It’s a sad sentence to write, but it backs up the frustrations that Flyers fans have had in recent seasons, puts statistical meaning behind what we see with the eye test, and illustrates a key need that the Flyers have struggled to fill. For a few seasons, we had our 1C in Sean Couturier, a goalie who can win games in Carter Hart, but lacked that final third piece to be a true contender.
Now, with trade rumors surrounding Carter Hart, and Couturier recovering from a lost season due to injury, it would be a huge gain to see a true #1 defenseman rise from the ashes of this newly started Flyer rebuild, whether its one of the prospects, young players who have already cracked the NHL, or someone yet to be drafted or acquired.
In Briere we trust.
