In this deep dive, I will try to find out who are the best defensive forwards and the best defensive defensemen on the Maine Timber who currently seats in last place in the SMJHL with only six wins after 37 games.

First, we need to identify which statistics we will use to find the best defensive players on the team. Even if it has its flaws, +/- is a good place to start if you compare players who play on the same team, because they are put in similar situations. Then, we can use takeaways to evaluate how often a player regain possession for his team. Shot blocks can also be used because it prevents the other team from getting a shot on goal. We won’t use defensive game ratings, because we don’t have the details on how it’s calculated, and it would be too easy to only use this data point. Then we have shots against per 60 minutes of ice time and goals against per 60 minutes of ice time who are good measure of what the opposing team is able to generate will the player is on the ice. We will also use Corsi against and Fenwick against even if this they don’t adjust for time on the ice.

In total, we will use the seven statistics that are provided by FHM which were enumerated in the previous paragraph. For each statistic, we will rank the player against his teammates. Let’s look at an example. The Maine Timber currently has six defensemen. If we use +/-, the defenseman with the lowest +/- will be assigned a rank of 1 and the defenseman with the worst +/- will be assigned a rank of 6. If two players have the same value for a statistic, they will have the same rank. Since we will have these rankings for all seven statistics, we will use an average of those seven rankings to identify which players rank better than their teammates in the defensive department. The lower the average ranking is, the better the player does defensively in comparison to his teammates at the same position.

Let’s start by looking at the forward. Since Walter Burke recently joined the team from Anaheim, we won’t take him into consideration, because most of his numbers came from his time back there. Looking at the table below which contains the defensive statistics for the Timber’s forward and their ranking against the other player of the team, we found that Victor Ball is the player who has offered the best performance in the defensive department for the team with an average ranking of 5.50. Julian Kazarine and Ellis McPickle complete the top three of the best defensive forwards for the Timber, while Maxime Allard and Dogwood Maple offer the worst defensive performance among the team forward.



The table for the defensemen is provided below. Sean Gatez offers the best performance follows closely by Puddles O'Duck, before we see a significant drop in the average ranking. On the other side, Lucas Kaiser is the Maine defenseman who has performed the worst since the beginning of the season.



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