Defenceman usage during the injury disaster

As all Leafs fans know, the team has played the last week, comprising five games, without Morgan Rielly, Jake Muzzin or TJ Brodie. In that span, Jordie Benn played part of one game, Victor Mete four, and Mac Hollowell has surprised nearly everyone by playing all five decently well.

We can all tell by watching that the recipe for the defence now, post Rielly injury, is to rely on Mark Giordano. The scale of that reliance becomes clear below:

This is all-situations time, so in the “Now” portion, it’s going to be skewed by how many PK or PP minutes there happened to be more than in the “Then” portion, where more games played regularizes the average.