Isn't it amazing how so many "incompetent" NHL defensemen manage to stay employed and become tenured veterans in the league? Apparently, some fans can see right through these guys, but NHL coaches, general managers and pro scouts cannot.
To hear some folks say it, there should be no place in the lineup, much less significant ice time, for any defenseman who is something other than a high-scoring shutdown defender who is impervious to mistakes, injuries and fatigue from day one of the season until his team lifts the Stanley Cup at the end of every season.
Anything less than clearly calls for six new, perfect defensemen to be brought via the draft, trade and free agency -- all at cap-friendly prices -- by the new GM who always makes the right roster moves and the new coach with the flawless, innovative unbeatable system.
When it comes to some hockey fans assessing defensemen, the paint often seems bluer on the other side of center ice. There isn't as much emotional investment in other teams' games and, as a result, there is less of tendency to hyperfocus on a defenseman's every flaw.
In my experience, Flyers fans are particularly harsh on their own team's defensemen. This was true even in the 1970s (ask Tom Bladon) and 1980s (Behn Wilson, Doug Crossman) but especially in the internet age. Goalies may get the toughest treatment, but the blueline corps is never far behind. It always seems like there are a few whipping boys on D who can do no right in the eyes of many fans. Matt Carle is the current target of choice among many Flyers fans.
No defenseman who has ever played the game, not even Bobby Orr, is perfect all of the time. Defensemen who handle the puck a lot typically turn it over more frequently, and that includes even All-Star caliber guys.
There is no defenseman who never gets caught out of position or misses the net when he shoots. When the other team comes through the neutral zone with speed, all defensemen have to backpedal to try to keep the rush to the outside. No defenseman clears the puck to safety each and every time, never screens his goalie or accidentally deflects the puck into his own net when trying to block shots.
Hockey is a game of mistakes played by humans. Most of the time, goals get scored because of a chain of "small" errors of commission or omission committed by multiple players. There is also no shortage of times where someone makes the "right" defensive play and a goal gets scored anyway. There isn't always one guy to blame.
I don't think anyone can convincingly argue that the current Flyers do not need to improve their team defense next season. But team is the key word. Unless the forwards collectively are as committed to helping keep pucks out of their own net as they are to attacking at the offensive end of the ice, the team is not going to have a stellar GAA regardless of its blueline personnel or goaltender.
Of course, the defensemen all have their own crucial roles to play. Building a championship caliber blueline operates under the same principle as assembling the forward corps. You need players with just the right mixture of size and mobility, physicality and puck skills. Having too many of one type of player on the blueline makes the club easier for opponents to play against, especially in the playoffs.
Ideally, the team has at least one defenseman who regularly contributes on the offensive end, three or four defensemen with good mobility and passing skills and a couple guys who can throw their weight around and block shots with regularity. It is preferable to have at least one or two righthanded shots, as much for their stick positioning in the defensive zone as for holding in pucks at the point and shooting at the offensive end. Teams would also ideally like to have a blend of youth and experience.
What often happens in the NHL is that a club ends up with a group of defensemen who
individually belong in the NHL and could be an asset to a championship team (perhaps even in tandem with their current partner as one of the pairings) but collectively aren't quite the right mix. Other times, the top four or five defensemen are an effective blend as is but the team lacks depth beneath them, which creates problems when attrition (injuries, fatigue) take effect over the latter part of the season.
The rarest of commodities in the NHL is the true "franchise defenseman" who embodies six or more characteristics among the following nine traits: regular goal-scoring ability, passing that triggers top-speed breakouts from the defensive zone, outstanding positional defense, size and physicality, high-end mobility skating forward or backward, the hockey sense to known when to pinch and when to stay back, shot blocking, durability and locker room leadership.
There is not a single defenseman in the NHL who simultaneously has all nine traits going for him. Thus, even if a club has a franchise defenseman, there still must be other quality defensemen around him that embody some of the other characteristics.
Besides, even if the top guy can play 25 or even 30 minutes per game along with his defense partner, the other defensemen still need to get out there for the remainder of the game. Unless the supporting case is equally well blended, the team will still come up short in the spring. Weaknesses ALWAYS get exposed eventually.
Once you move down the blueline chain from the Norris Trophy candidates (the A+ level defensemen) to the All-Star caliber guys (the A and A- group), you find a glut of B-level (third to fifth starter) and C-level (sixth or seventh) guys who embody fewer of the nine aforementioned desired traits. It just a question of finding combinations of players who can balance off each other's strengths and weaknesses.
OK, enough half-baked philosophizing. The point I'm getting at here is that barring a trade for Shea Weber (an A+ level defenseman) or someone in the A-minus range ala Tobias Enström, the Flyers are looking this summer at adding someone in the B to C range who will NOT be a major individual difference maker and WILL have some flaws that will frustrate segments of the fan base at times.
Want to see the Flyers sign someone like Dennis Wideman? Fine, but be prepared for folks griping about some of his decision-making and being "soft". Hope for someone like Bryan Allen or Barrett Jackman? OK, but be aware you'll be getting a guy who is going to get beaten wide sometimes and has adequate-at-best puck skills. Want to see the club make a heavy sales pitch to collegiate free-agent-to-be Justin Schultz? Terrific, but then be ready to be patient through the defensive growing pains and general inconsistency that virtually all young blueliners go through in their first 2-3 years in the NHL.
Final thought: The one area where I think there is plenty of legitimate room to criticize the Flyers when it comes to defensemen is their issues in drafting and nurturing a higher percentage of their own blueline corps. There are different ways to build a defense, and the Flyers tend to do better at bringing in long-term starters via trade and free agency rather than via the draft and farm system.
One byproduct of the win-now philosophy is often impatience with young players. Another is that the starting defensemen in particular often wind up costing more, salary-cap wise and/or in terms of assets expended in trades to acquire them. The Nashville Predators and current New Rangers successfully built much of their defense via the draft or trade while the now-established defenseman was still young and unproven (that's how the Rangers got Ryan McDonagh and the Flyers got Braydon Coburn, for instance).
There really is not a single "right" way to build a championship-caliber defense. It took the LA Kings some 45 years to finally do it. Yet, beyond Drew Doughty, how many "star" defensemen do they have? The New Jersey Devils got to Game 6 of the Cup Finals this year without a franchise defenseman at the top. The vaunted blueliners on the Predators and Rangers were home watching the Stanley Cup Finals on TV.
Winning a Cup relies as much as on timing and some sheer good luck as it does careful planning and astute roster decisions. Believe me, if there was one man -- whether he plays forward, defense or goal -- that was guaranteed to put the Flyers over the top in 2012-13, the club would move hell and high water to ensure that player wore orange and black next year. But the simple truth is that there are no guarantees in hockey.
**************
Eighteen years ago today, the Flyers and Florida Panthers reached an agreement for Florida to release general manager Bob Clarke from his contract in exchange for a second-round pick (which was used to select Ryan Johnson) in the 1994 NHL Draft.
Clarke was then immediately hired as the Flyers general manager, succeeding Russ Farwell. Because the lead time before the '94 Draft was short -- it was held on June 28-29 in Hartford -- the Flyers had Farwell stay on long enough to complete his work in preparing for the Draft.
The Flyers, who missed the playoffs in 1993-94, did not have a pick in the first round of the draft. The selection had been traded to Quebec as part of the Eric Lindros trade in 1992. Ultimately transferred to Washington, the pick originally belonging to the Flyers was used to select defenseman Nolan Baumgartner (who, many years later, briefly played for the Flyers during the disastrous 2006-07 season).
As a result of the Clarke transaction, the Flyers did not have a pick until the third round. They chose hard-hitting Russian defenseman Artem Anisimov (not to be confused with the current New York Rangers forward of the same name).
The defensive partner of Oleg Tverdovsky( the second overall pick of the '94 Draft) on the Russian junior national team, Anisimov was the defensive conscience of a highly effective duo. The Flyers believed Anisimov, who played his club team hockey for Ak Bars Kazan, would become a shutdown defenseman someday in the NHL.
The Hockey News agreed. In THN's 1995 Draft Preview issue system rankings, Anisimov was ranked as a four-star prospect. He was regarded as a more positionally sound version of Darius Kasparaitis.
Unfortunately, in the fifth game of the following season, Anisimov suffered a grotesque knee injury in which he tore the anterior, posterior and medial ligaments in one of his knees. He missed a full calendar year.
When he returned, Anisimov was a shell of the player he had been before, losing both a full stride off his speed and become tentative to initiate physical play. The Flyers never brought him over and by, 1998, he was clearly no longer in the team's long-term plans.
Anisimov remained active the Russian Super League (the predecessor to the KHL) until 2008, but never again was more than an average defenseman at that level.
As it turned out, sixth round pick Colin Forbes was the lone Flyers draftee from the class of 1994 who eventually suited up for the big club. Among Philadelphia's other picks, three others eventually played in the NHL but never played a game for the Flyers.
Less than three months after the 1994 draft, Tampa Bay Lightning general manager Phil Esposito called Clarke and asked if the club would be willing to trade sixth-round pick Alexander Selivanov. On Sept. 6, 1994, the Flyers traded the rights to the Spartak Moscow forward to the Lightning in exchange for Tampa's 1995 fourth round pick (which the Flyers used to pick a Slovakian forward, Radovan Somik, who later had a brief NHL career in Philadelphia).
Selivanov did not have a great NHL career, but he had an interesting one. For one thing, he married Esposito's daughter, Carrie. The couple remained together until Carrie's untimely passing earlier this year. On the ice, he was at times a pretty effective goal scorer in the NHL (if a bit one-dimensional as a player).
As a rookie, Selivanov scored 10 goals in the half-season that was the lockout-shortened 1994-95 campaign. The next year, he scored 30 goals for Tampa. Thereafter, his production declined steadily but he briefly lead in the NHL in scoring in late October of the 1999-2000 season as a member of Edmonton Oilers. Still an active player at the end of the 2011-12 season, Selivanov has played in various high-end and lower-end European leagues. He spent the most recent season in the Netherlands.
In the eighth round, the Flyers selected Yale University defenseman Ray Giroux. A Hobey Baker candidate his senior year, Giroux was deemed by the Flyers to be a little too undersized to be an effective defenseman at the NHL level. His rights were dealt in 1998 and he later briefly played in the NHL for the Islanders and Devils. For the last seven years, Giroux has played in the RSL/KHL where he has been one of the premier two-way import defensemen in the Russian league.
I have always believed that Giroux was simply a victim of bad timing from an NHL standpoint. At the time of his "prospect years," smaller defensemen had a very hard time cracking NHL rosters unless they were of bonafide superstar caliber. Small defensemen were an endangered species in the NHL of the late-90s to mid-2000s. That changed a bit after the 2004-05 lockout but Giroux was already 29 years old by that point.
In the ninth round, the Flyers considered two lesser-known Swedish players recommended by scout Inge Hammarström: talented but inconsistent Leksand goaltender Johan Hedberg and a minor league power forward named Tomas Holmström. The Flyers opted for the goalie and Detroit ended up with Holmström (a longtime friend and frequent teammate of Mikael Renberg) in the next round after Philly opted for an OHL player (Andre Payette) who was three years younger and had a similar collection of playing style traits plus a willingness to drop the gloves.
The Flyers approached Hedberg with a contract offer in the summer of 1997 but the goalie's agent and Clarke never came close to reaching terms. As a result, Hedberg ended up spending time in the now-defunct IHL before Clarke traded his rights to the San Jose Sharks. Now 39 years old, Hedberg has carved out a decent niche as an NHL backup goalie over the last dozen years.
**************
KINDLE USERS: Please sign up for Flyers Buzz. For more information click here.
Philadelphia Flyers Blogger •NHL.com • 
Join the Discussion:
»