How to judge defensive players?

[connormcjesus]

I have a couple of stay-at-home defensemen, defensive defensemen, and defensive forwards. AvR is obviously biased towards offensive players so these players' AvRs are way lower than they should be. So my question is how do you judge how well your defensive players are doing? I wish there were possession stats in this game.

[philou21]

Well when I check mines I don't really go far to be honest. I watch if their plus/minus is good and if a stay at home defenseman do his job, his performance will be between 6.7 and 7 most likely compared to 7 and plus for your more complete/star defensemen.

[coombs14]

My observations:

The problem I find is that defensive D-men's moral drops when they continue to have an AvR of below 7. Alternatively, someone who is mostly a terrible d-man in real life in Yannick Weber, puts up amazing numbers because he is so offensively inclined.

In my season as Vancouver both Tanev and Hamuis (2015-2016 season) posted terrible results. I ended up letting Hamuis walk as a UFA and trading Tanev for a more offensive D-man.

[CeeBee]

Defensive or checking centers have the same problem. Even ones that should be good 2nd line centers have ratings in the mid 6's or lower and always seem to have bad morale. Centers also seem to get too few points compared to wingers. Too many high point d-men as well. Still lots of work to be done to be realistic.

[nine-o]

I can't help but wonder if the problem with defensive players is often speed. I find a lot of the tactics built into EHM require speed - especially of d-men - but the stay-at-home types tend to be slower. So far this is just a theory of mine, but I'm going to experiment with dump and chase tactics to see.

I don't find the realism bad at all actually - I'm Canadian, watched and played hockey literally my whole life. When I watch those little colored circles whip around, I see patterns of movement that you notice after watching a lot of hockey. I think the tactics are often wildly different from what's employed in the NHL, and I think that's where the disparity is coming from.

[Shindigs]

The way I judge defensive players is quite simple. Time per GA, it's the only stat that matters in the end. Sadly it's not technically in the game. But you can get it with a very simple spreadsheet and some patience. It's not in your statistics screen though.

So this is what you do:
1. Go to Scouting
2. go to the player search tab
3. under filters, set show own players to yes.
4. in the "included text" or w/e it's called. Input your team's name.
5. in the "stats" view you can get the pass%, which is good to know for the first pass of def players.
6. in the "more stats" view you have the +/- split up into + and -.
7. make some coffee, this will take a while.
8. input the - values of all your players into an excel sheet.
9. input the average playtime of your players, the pp time, and the bp time. (this will make you so good at mutiplying by 6, since you have to turn seconds into percentages of minutes)
10. (Games Played * (ATOI - PPATOI - BPATOI)) / Goals against
11. Drink that coffee, you earned it!

That way you can see the time between minuses for the player, it makes judging how good a player is doing defensively very easy indeed, and I find it helps a lot with picking penalty killers. I don't picture Ehlers as a stud PK specialist. But apparently that man can just hold up the puck for so long and pretend he's Denis Savard that the clock just ticks away. And he can score shorties to boot!