Damon Severson is one of the best defensive defencemen in the NHL

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By CJ Turtoro (@CJTDevil)

Okay, okay, everybody just relax. I’m not saying Damon Severson is a rim-protector of the highest order. I’m not saying he is going to clear the crease and level anyone who comes near the slot; or that he’s an impenetrable stonewall of shot-blocking. I'm not even going to try to demonstrate that Severson is a much better player than many believe (though that's likely true), just that he’s a different player.

The assessment of his game is complicated by the fact that he leverages what is typically considered an “offensive” skillset – like moving the puck – for a primarily defensive purpose. As such, he's probably worse than you think offensively, but better than you think defensively.

Now, I guarantee there is going to be someone who responds to the tweet of this article without reading it and all the tweet will be is a gif of Damon botching the 2-on-1 in Toronto – the latest in what has become quite the anthology of defensive gaffes.

But those gaffes, while extremely memorable, happen only a few times a year. And, for a guy that’s been playing around 24 minutes a night for the Devils, it strains credulity to believe that those dozen or so events over his career are going to significantly move the needle in terms of calculating his overall value. 

The negative impact of a play like that should be on par with the positive impact of scoring a goal. Pretend for a moment that Damon didn’t make the Toronto gaffe, but he had only five goals and 21 assists this season as opposed to six goals and 21 assists. So he goes from six goals and a gaffe, to 5 goals and no gaffe. The end result is the same – a single goal reduction of our team’s differential – but in the version where he makes the ugly mistake, he becomes a meme that is burnt into Twitter’s long-term memory. 

If there is one single reason that analytics exist in sports, it is for situations like this. The human brain suffers immensely from recall bias, and might be even worse at weighing impacts of things it does recall appropriately.

Analytics allows us a far less subjective approach to putting things in perspective. One metric that aims to express that information is Evolving-Hockey’s xGAR. It is an estimate for the total goals of value contributed by a player’s shifts and it can be broken into offensive and defensive categories. 

If you focus on the defensive half of the metric, Severson has the 8th highest defensive impact in terms of xGAR in the NHL this season, the 21st highest over the past two seasons, and (as the table below shows) the 10th highest over the past three seasons.

How can we square these independent assessments? Someone who watches Damon Severson play enough will likely be able to point out more hideous mistakes from him than almost any other defencemen in recent Devils memory. How could that player also be one of the most valuable defensive assets in the NHL?

To understand this we need to start by realizing that we are imperfect and that we are far more likely to remember dramatic events like the Toronto 2-on-1 than small things. That’s bad. We have to make sure that any method of assessment we use is able to allow for 10 acts worth 0.1 goals each, which you’ve likely forgotten, to cancel out the one thing which contributed a whole goal that you remember vividly. You saw the terrible play that produced a goal already, so let me give you an example of the other side of the coin – the plays you almost definitely forget.

Possibly the biggest positive surprise of the Devils’ season has been the Jonas Siegenthaler-Severson pairing, and Siegenthaler has gotten plenty of credit for it – which he deserves.

Here’s an example of a great play by Siegenthaler that is then brought to the bank and cashed by an extremely boring play from Severson. It’s from a January loss to the Bruins.

This is Severson and Siegenthaler vs Bergeron and Marchand – the best of the Devils D vs the best of the Bruins O. Siegenthaler gets the best of Bergeron, tying him up behind the net to prevent the rebound chance. While Siegenthaler is doing his job, Severson is doing his.

1. Severson is rightly trying to feel out what Marchand’s plan is because Bergeron could still win the battle and send a pass across Blackwood’s nose for a tap-in. 

2. Severson knows the only guy he had to worry about was Marchand so his job is now to help Siegs win the battle.

3. While Marchand plan is to join the fight and go where the puck is, Severson sees where the battle is headed goes where the puck will be.

4. Severson gets the puck from Siegs, has a step on everyone and and gets the puck to Bratt in stride. The puck is out of the DZ less than three seconds after Seves first touched it.

Let me make something clear. I am not trying to say that this is a consequential or impressive play. Quite the opposite, in fact. Severson literally just did his job. He did exactly what he was supposed to do, when he was supposed to do it, and the two Devils defenders neutralized an OZ possession from one of the best lines in the NHL.

Grabbing possession the way Damon did there is called a defensive zone (DZ) retrieval. According to Corey Sznajder’s tracking data, it was one of 17(!) DZ retrievals he made that game and one of 10(!) that led to a zone exit. Of the 259 games tracked this season, that is the 2nd most retrievals any defender has managed (Chabot 18, December 18th) and the 2nd most that led to an exit (Letang 11, December 17th).

You might correctly suspect that a metric like this is – similar to blocked shots, for instance – often rewards defencemen who are spending needless time in the DZ. If they didn’t allow opponents to enter the DZ in the first place, this wouldn’t be an issue. And, sure enough, the tops of these DZ retrieval leaderboards tend to give up the blueline quite frequently. But, not Damon.

Severson was targeted at the blueline 10 times against Boston, only allowed three entries with possession, and denied four entries outright. It’s pretty rare for skaters to prevent more entries than they allow with possession. And if we look only at the players that did that, Severson’s performance against Boston towers over the competition.

That game was an outlier for Damon, but it is a representation of one of the strengths of his game that might contribute to the positive defensive impacts that seem counterintuitive at first glance. He has excellent zone control. He retrieves the puck in the DZ more frequently than any other Devils defender, and he does so more efficiently than any of them other than Dougie.

This is just one example of the skills Damon has and has had his whole career. Back when I was making vizzes of Corey's data, Damon always showed up as a positive contributor in every transition metric that existed.

Damon is the perfect example of a player you need numbers for. He does a ton of little things well but makes hideous mistakes at a disturbing rate.

The human eye and brain will be biased towards the latter, but the numbers know the former is more important.

There is a reason the Devils coaching staff always seems to end up treating Damon Severson as the #1 defender by the end of the season. It might be because they have stumbled upon the same fact that we have by using analytics: Damon Severson is quite simply one of the most valuable defensive assets in the NHL