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No Risk, a Little Reward for Ken Hitchcock: The Dallas Stars’ Defense’s Offense

Posted on by Robert Tiffin

By now, you know that Ken Hitchcock is one to preach safety first. His system keeps the third forward high in the offensive zone to protect against odd-man rushes, and you’ll frequently see all five defenders collapsing towards the net at the other end instead of keeping someone ready to transition off a turnover. Simply put, he believes in a comprehensive defensive system that allows the Stars to strangle chances, and then capitalize on the other team’s mistakes.

So far this season, his system has, in terms of outshooting opponents, worked quite well:

Hey, this is great! Dallas has drastically improved its control of the game’s events from last season, and while a healthy team helps a great deal (which Lindy Ruff almost never really had last year), there are more obvious signs that this is Hitch’s doing:

Just a reminder: CA/60 = shots allowed per 60 minutes, while CF/60 = shots taken. The Stars, as you can see, are dominating the percentage of chances in games (on the whole), but their actual offense is stubbornly mediocre; Dallas is 18th in the NHL in goals per game.

We’ve talked quite a bit about how that might just be what a more conservative Dallas team is capable of; with players like Devin Shore and Martin Hanzal getting big minutes, and with Jamie Benn and Tyler Seguin each fighting through some scoring funks of their own (particularly on the power play lately, Benn’s goal the other night notwithstanding), I’m not sure you can hope for Dallas to crack the top 10 in team scoring this year with Hitch’s playing style.

The problem for Dallas, however, hasn’t only been their tepid attack. It’s that, despite their stranglehold on shots per game, they’re still giving up goals. They’re only 15th in the league in goals allowed per game. Part of that has been middling-at-best save percentages from the goalies over the season, and (perhaps an even bigger) part of it has been the continued plunge of the penalty kill (along with a 6th-highest total of minor penalties taken). Special teams as a whole, in fact, have been horrible for a while now.

The goalies will have some hot streaks over the season, and surely the penalty kill could clamber back into the top-10 with Hanzal and Marc Methot both in the lineup; but while they wait for special teams to regress back to not-terrible levels, the Stars could help themselves out not just by furthering tightening an already-tight defense, but with what Brett Hull would probably say is the best defense of all: a good offense.

(Chart via Sean Tierney, who is great.)

Now, the first thing that jumps out here is that the point where the Stars’ shots began lagging corresponded pretty closely with the time Julius Honka was not in the lineup, which is to say from late October to the end of November. We don’t need to have the Julius Honka debate again—he seems to be a good and helpful player that Hitchock doesn’t trust over the more seasoned players available to him—but let’s talk about something else that happened at the end of October: Greg Pateryn.

On 10/26, Pateryn drew into the lineup for Dallas, and he has played every game since, always being paired with Dan Hamhuis. For a coach looking for defensively stout play, this pairing seems to have provided it:

That sea of tranquility in front of the net is a coach’s dream for a shutdown pairing. This duo has become a go-to for Ken Hitchcock, with Pateryn averaging over 19 minutes per night from the outset.

There is a cost this pairing pays, however, and it’s much the same cost as the team’s paid all season for a better defense:

You already know that John Klingberg is where the Stars’ offense comes from, but this shows just how much offensive weight is laid upon his swift shoulders. The puck simply doesn’t head toward the other team’s net very much when the second pairing is on the ice.

Pateryn and Hamhuis shut things down, and maybe get the puck out to center ice long enough to change. Then another pairing comes on. Rinse and repeat.

Here’s what we’re talking about when it comes to defenders helping to exit the defensive zone with or without possession:

Once again, you see how low-risk Greg Pateryn is. He makes barely half as many attempts at exiting the zone as Klingberg does, rarely ices the puck, and rarely fails to exit when he does try.

Stephen Johns, by way of contrast, is hell-bent on getting out of the zone. He helps his team transition with the puck more than any other defender but John Klingberg, but he also gets stopped more than anyone else, too.

This is such a great way of distilling the discussion between the Stars’ presumptive 2nd and 3rd right-handed defensemen (you know as well as I do that Hitch will scratch Honka when Methot gets healthy). It’s not about who’s “better,” but about your philosophy behind what a second pairing defenseman ought to be.

Pateryn is the safe guy who can shut things down, so long as you’re fine with a flip up the ice to the other team or into the bench, or your goalie covering the puck for a change. I means your next pairing has to carry the water, but at least they do so with the score still intact.

Johns is the guy more in the Lindy Ruff mold, someone who is trying to create offense quickly and skate the puck out himself, and often does. (And yes, I get the irony of the fact that Ruff scratched Johns more than a few times during his time here.) He also, however, is more likely to turn the puck over in the defensive zone than Pateryn.

Klingberg, by the way, is the absurdly good defenseman who can excel with a dynamic style because of how skilled he is, but who will, during his weaker moments, have some costly mistakes (which are far, far outweighed by his contributions).

Hitchcock has made his choice clear: He’d rather give big minutes to a player like Pateryn who can stop the game dead in its tracks and eat up a minute of clock without hurting you than someone like Johns, who might help you, but with more attendant risk. Coaches are almost all conservative when it comes to their teams. They want the player that they know, who will give them what they expect. It’s why veterans like Roman Polak and Matt Martin win jobs on Mike Babcock’s Maple Leafs, and why Hitchcock seemed so much more enamored with Martin Hanzal over Radek Faksa to begin the season despite their respective performances.

And really, can you blame them? Think of it from a goalie’s point of view: would you rather play a ton of calmer, 2-1 games and wind up slightly over .500, always “feeling” like your team was in it, or would you rather suffer a few bad blowouts over the season and make more saves per night, even if it means you win a few more games overall? Yes, I know you’re supposed to say “wins” and all that, but on a slightly subconscious level, most of us will take the lower-risk route if the reward isn’t close to guaranteed. Maybe I’m just saying humans don’t like stress.

We fans, more distanced from these events than the employees whose jobs intertwine with them, crave the excitement that high-event hockey provides. We want sports to be fun—not just in terms of the result, but in the process itself. We are greedy, because despite the frustration, higher-stress hockey costs us mostly nothing (unless your blood pressure got as high as mine did after that third Washington goal the other night). We would probably be just fine with this, all things being equal:

I mean, perfect example, right? There is “more red” in the offensive zone for Honka-Johns, but who among us could really stand in front of a Hall of Fame coach and espouse the belief that this level of chaos would be better for the team than the dull safety that Pateryn and Hamhuis provide? And that’s not even taking into account the additional data that NHL coaches have available to them.

To us, the evidence that stats like xGF% spell out seems clear: If you’re scoring more than you’re allowing, you’re winning more than you’re losing, even if you’re winning 5-3 or 7-5 a few more times than your goalies might prefer.

But this year, even those numbers could leave some room for discussion. Johns is slightly ahead of Pateryn (and Hamhuis) in terms of league-wide xGF%, but his numbers relative to the team suffer a bit more. Again, you’re left with the decision of settling for Pateryn’s high floor, or hoping for Johns’s higher ceiling.

EDIT: commenter jere_the_winger makes the sapient point below that Johns’s numbers were likely heavily impacted by his frequent pairing with Jamie Oleksiak earlier this season. This is a good point, and in lieu of an easy way of proving this, I am taking it as a working hypothesis that Johns’s xGF% with Honka would soon surpass Pateryn, and then some.

When special teams were rocking and rolling, the Stars were doing all right. For a team that plays low-scoring, slim-margin games, the Stars can get burned by just a couple of mistakes. It’s the inherent (and perhaps ironic) risk of a low-risk system, as the Stars saw against Washington on Tuesday: if you’re not going to score a lot of goals, then you’d better hope everyone does their job, all the time. Special teams have not been doing theirs, and it’s reduced the Stars clinging to life at the bottom of the playoff picture for almost half the season now. Sure, you can say special teams will get better, but no team with Cup aspirations can look at this body of work through 35 games and just hope they magically start to win the special teams battle once the playoffs begin.

It seems totally counterintuitive, but that 2015-16 Stars team taught the league a valuable lesson: you can make an ostensibly risky system (in front of two marginal goalies, no less!) a whole lot less risky if you just play it miles better than anyone else. Outscoring your problems is nothing to be ashamed of. It’s literally how you win games, no matter what system you have. The Stars will never be able to duplicate what they had two years ago, but Hitch’s team needs to decide if they can afford to keep betting all their chips on the low-risk game. So far, it hasn’t worked out. Either Dallas needs to find some goals from somewhere else in the lineup, or they need to find a different lineup altogether. But I don’t think you can expect the system to change any time soon.

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