Defensive Dimension Dossier
Have you ever been curious about which defensive skills we can actually measure in the current hockey analytics landscape? Well that is precisely what this viz aims to accomplish. With the Defensive Dimensions Dossier, you can parse through various shutdown tools within players’ skillsets over the years. These are grouped into five categories, plus deployment, with all individual skills shown as percentiles by position for the selected season.
Speaking of seasons, every one since 2020 is available here, with the addition of a “Multi-Year” option. This selection is a weighted combination of the previous 3 years using a 4-2-1 system from the most to least recent of those seasons, providing us with a snapshot estimation of where the chosen skater currently stands.
You also have the option to view the skater’s defensive SPAR (Standings Points Above Replacement) rather than its percentile form by clicking the tick box just below the bottom edge of the visualization as pictured here. D-SPAR looks to combine all 10 defensive skills here and account for deployment context to obtain the defence-only portion of a player’s measured impact by our SPAR model (whose write-up can be found here).
For a more in-depth breakdown regarding the measured skills, how they all fit together to get one SPAR component, and what it all tells us about the requirements to contend in today’s NHL, you can read the article below that spawned this dashboard.