Just as coaches focus on who a player’s teammates should be, they also focus on who they are matched up against in a game. It is one thing to put two defensemen together; it is another to decide whether they should play the most minutes and/or take on the other team’s best players when possible. While its impact may be overblown, who a defenseman plays against matters to a degree. In this post, I will explore how the New Jersey Devils defensemen performed against their competition.
One of the more interesting methods to determine competition has been the WoodMoney metric for competition.