Damon Severson's defensive game has made him a legit top pair defender

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Today’s guest post was written by C.J. Turtoro. You can find him on Twitter @CJTDevil.

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Damon Severson’s career has been interesting to watch for someone who is up-to-date on whatever the most recent statistical innovations are.

He was seen as a phenom in the days where Corsi reigned supreme. Over his first three seasons, among the 169 NHL defenders with 2000+ minutes, Damon was 9th in RelT Corsi +/- per 60. That’s an elite level of production for your first three seasons in the league.

Many were skeptical of this assessment because, in watching Damon play, it was impossible not to notice his defensive miscues and occasionally egregious indifference to defending the netmouth.

To their credit, those who observed this were tapping into something important without explicitly stating it: shot quality. Weighting the shots based on how dangerous they are did, in fact, show that Seves had some real problems.

Now, expected goals models did exist at this time (Brian MacDonald created one as far back as 2012), but they really didn’t catch on in the analytical mainstream for a few more years.

The first model to be routinely updated on a publicly-accessible website was in 2016 in Emmanuel Perry’s Corsica (side note: congrats to Manny on being hired by the Mariners).

By 2018 there were enough different models that people were doing analyses comparing the effectiveness of each. It’s around this time that xG models became what I’d consider “mainstream” in the analytics community.

So, over Severson’s three years, Corsi was slowly ceding ground to xGs. Which led to a confusing assessment of Damon because he was the only one of the top 10 Corsi defenders to have a negative xG impact. In particular, his xGA (expected goal defense) was below-average in his rookie year and falling over his first few seasons.

In short, Severson was an Corsi darling when conventional analytics struggled to capture his defensive lapses. As the metrics got more sophisticated, the outlook on his future started to seem far less rosy.

But, in an absolute trainwreck of a year, it feels like it’s gotten lost that Severson may have finally figured out his defensive game. Take a look at his isolated impact heatmaps from HockeyViz.

Last season was the best defensive season of his professional career, and his first net positive impact since his sophomore season. There is a consiliance of research converging on that assessment.

According to Evolving-Hockey’s xGAR, Severson’s defensive value this past season came out of absolutely nowhere. He put about 6 goals of defensive value after only barely clearing 1 in the best of his previous 5 seasons.

Severson has simply found a new gear defensively. While his offensive results have not been as good as the best in his career, it’s probably worth peeking into why that’s happened as well. Has he lost anything off his transition game? Is he not moving the puck as well anymore? That doesn’t appear to be the case.

According to Corey Sznajder’s tracking data, Severson is accumulating zone entries and exits just as frequently as ever, and his zone entry efficiency is the best it’s ever been.

What you do see stick out here is that his shot assists are coming at the same rate as in his early career, but he’s individual shot rate has declined each of the four seasons.

In other words, he’s generating a comparable amount of offense, but doing it by deferring. This is good news because we want defenders who can set up forwards for high opportunity chances rather than firing away from the point (as good as Damon is at that). 

Severson has always been a good puck-mover and an effective shooter. This past season saw him develop his defensive game in a way we had not seen previously. Combine his 5v5 defensive improvement with his strong play on the PK this past season, and you get a defender that has, at long last, begun to morph into something resembling a top-pairing skater.

This season, he’ll need to prove that last year’s defensive growth wasn’t a fluke or mirage, and that he can parlay his transition and passing game into sustained offense.

If he can do those things, don’t be shocked if Damon Severson sticks around the Devils top pairing for a little while as the best 200-ft blueliner on the roster.

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