The Defenseman Shuffle
Teams that pay a premium vs. those who can build from within
This was originally going to be a post on the Darren Raddysh trade & his new eight-year contract with the Leafs. Researching for that article had me thinking of some broader, league-wide topics. Then the Bowen Byram trade happened & I decided to change the direction entirely. Mostly because I think the overall point with Raddysh is pretty cut-and-dry. You have a defenseman who was pretty late to the game, making his NHL debut in his mid-20’s, who ascended to the top-pair on one of the league’s best teams after only three seasons and had a career year scoring 22 goals & 70 points.
The backhalf of that deal is going to hurt but the hope is that Raddysh will give them a few years of stability along with a few goals that will break some NHL EDGE records. Diving into his career was interesting because he didn’t take a traditional route to the free agency payday. He wasn’t drafted and ended up in Tampa’s farm system after a couple of years in Rockford & Hartford before the Lightning gave him a chance. His ice time jumped top 23-24 minutes a game after hovering around 17-19 minutes a night for most of his career and he crushed it in that role.
An injury to Victor Hedman and declining play from mainstays like Erik Cernak forced Raddysh to carry more of the load and it’s hard to ask for a better contract year than this. The sheltered defenseman taking the leap to a bigger role is a long-debated topic in hockey circles and there’s no real magic pill to determine if a player will succeed or not. It’s fitting that Tyler Dellow works in the Canes front office now because he was usually the first person to tell everyone to pump the breaks on sheltered defensemen who put up gaudy numbers in sheltered roles. Carolina’s had a great recent track record here with Sean Walker & Jalen Chatfield, but the Lightning are also up there with plugging any defensemen from their system into their lineup & not seeing a dropoff. If I’m planning on signing any D from Tampa, I’m looking at how Charle-Edouard D’Astous waltzed into their lineup and looked like he belonged after signing with the team as a 27-year old with more games played in the ECHL than the AHL.
Tampa has a defenseman factory going right now and that would be the only qualm I have with acquiring Raddysh. Not that he can’t succeed outside of their insulation, but it gave me a lot to think about with how they’ve been churning out these players from out of nowhere the past couple of years. Nick Perbix was the most recent example of this, signing in Nashville after crushing a third-pair role in Tampa for three years. He had an okay season with the Preds, blending in with that spilled box of cereal of a defense corps rather than providing any stability.
This is where diving into Raddysh’s stats & trajectory got interesting, if only because he played better when he got more minutes & responsibility.
Some of this isn’t too surprising, as you get more minutes with Nikita Kucherov when you’re higher in the lineup, which means more connected plays out of the zone. The workload with retrievals is what really took a leap last year and that’s something the Leafs should feel confident about when it comes to integrating Raddysh into their lineup. He might not get the same offensive opportunities, but at worst you have a malleable player who seems coachable. Where it gets even more interesting is looking at the stats of his partner, JJ Moser.
