Different NHL coaches take different approaches when it comes to matching their defencemen to the opposition's star forwards. There are extremes here – some coaches are pretty obsessive about getting a specific player matched against the opposition's best. Others open the gate like a minor hockey dad coaching a house league team. In order to illustrate this, I took the defenceman with the highest percentage of his time against the other team's star forward on each team and graphed it, with a red line to represent league average.
Let's talk about Zdeno Chara for a second. He's the Boston Bruin getting the obscene matchups.