When the Rangers lost Marc Staal and Mike Sauer, they lost more than two of their top four defensemen. They lost two of their most physical defensemen and two guys that have been relied upon for many games to neutralize the opposition’s top lines. They are out, and others are looked at to fill those gaping holes on defense. Although it is very tough to quantify how the Rangers will look when Staal and Sauer come back, we can look at who the workhorses are, and who is lining up against top quality –or bottom of the barrel– opponents.

Let’s state the obvious: Dan Girardi and Ryan McDonagh are the workhorses, and they are facing off against the opposition’s top lines night in and night out. They will be doing so for the foreseeable future too, as there does not appear to be any timetable for Staal and Sauer’s return. Using the eye test, it’s easy to say that Michael Del Zotto has been one of the Rangers better defenders as well, and to an extent he has been. But that’s why we have stats like QUALCOMP that measure the quality of competition that each player is facing.

A brief description of QUALCOMP, it is a positive or negative number, and the higher it is, the better competition a player is facing. Let’s look at the table below through the Rangers first three games:

Player GP QUALCOMP
Ryan McDonagh

3

0.635

Dan Girardi

3

0.475

Tim Erixon

3

0.144

Steve Eminger

3

-0.104

Jeff Woywitka

1

-0.494

Michael Del Zotto

3

-1.115

To sum up the table, the players facing the top quality competition are the ones you’d expect in McDonagh and Girardi. After that, it’s interesting to see that Tim Erixon is the player that coach John Tortorella seems to rely on the most when it comes to difficult opponents. The fact that they are the only three with positive QUALCOMP shows how much trust the coach has in them, and how his trust wavers with some of his other options.

Yes, Michael Del Zotto has been pretty good on defense this year, but he is way at the bottom of the QUALCOMP rankings. In fact, Del Zotto is at the very bottom in QUALCOMP for the entire league (excluding Sauer, who is injured). This is, of course, a very small sample size (just three games), and these numbers are likely to change dramatically as there is more of a regression to the mean (or progression to the mean for those slow out of the gate).

While those numbers themselves may change dramatically, the place where each defenseman resides on the list is likely to remain unchanged. It is widely known that with Staal and Sauer out, McDonagh and Girardi will be the top dogs on the blue line. What is troubling is that the Rangers have one defenseman that they are “breaking in” (Del Zotto), and another veteran –one that they relied on heavily last year– that are in the negatives with their QUALCOMP.

We do fall victim to small sample sizes here, as Jeff Woywitka has only played one game, and Steve Eminger took about 10-15 games last year to hit his stride and become that reliable defenseman that helped the Rangers through their injuries last season.  That said, trends will likely continue though, so expect to see Del Zotto facing off against lesser quality opponents, and expect the bulk of the heavy duty work to go to McDonagh and Girardi.

The positive to take out of this is that Tim Erixon has been facing some decent competition, better than both Eminger and Woywitka. He has been up to the task thus far. Although the number may change, he will still be considered to be a “second pairing” guy when it comes to the quality he is facing.

Share: 

Mentioned in this article:

More About: