This is an interesting quote by Jeff Blashill. I want to start off the top by saying that I am confused by what Jeff means by "while on ice stat" here. I am not aware of any models that have collected data for players when they are not on the ice... I am thinking he misspoke here and look into a few things he might have been getting at. There ar some areas that analytics fail to capture that I have come across. Let's look at Bedard for instance.

There is an obvious stat that pops out here when looking at Bedard's data and that is of course even strength defense. This may be what Blashill was alluding to when he said "While-on-ice stat" Chicago overall has been a very young and inexperienced team since Bedord joined the Hawks three years ago and the vets they have had have mostly been past their prime character guys. In other words, not very good. Because of this Chicago has had a tendency to play from behind quite a bit and when doing that, they, like any other team will mostly play a swarm offence and make high risk offensive plays to try to score and catch up. This usually leads to opportunities going the other way as well as players like home playing with a lot of fatigue in the defensive zone. Even if it is a tight game Bedard is more likely to play a lot of minutes under fatigue simply because he is by far the best player on his team. For that same reason Bedard is heavily targeted by the opposition because if you can nullify him, you probably beat Chicago. Since I watch a divorce worthy amount of hockey I have watched a lot of Chicago games, and I can say this data does not accurately portray Coonor's defensive ability.  These are a couple of contextual issues that analytics do not really capture well. Also taking into consideration that he too is very young and learning that aspect of NHL defensive awareness and I think as Chicago improves so to will this data. 

Aho has been championed as a top end defensive center by many for most of his career and for the most part it has showed up in analytic models throughout his career as well. However, as we can see the last three years has shown a steady decline is his defensive data. This is probably a good time to point out that defensive analytics do not just measure a player's defensive play in the defensive zone. It is a measure of a player's overall impact defensively in all three zones. As you can see Aho is and has always been a very good penalty kill guy. There is a fair difference between PK and 5 on5 defensive zone ability but a being good at PK still shows that a player does have solid defensive instincts. So why does he show data with defensive ability regression you ask? Well, I asked the same question and went back and watched several Carolina games over the last two seasons and what I came to realize was that coach Brind'Amour had been changing up his system to try to give Aho more ice time with high energy level in the offensive zone. Brindy was getting Aho to come off the ice more often when coming back to the defensive zone on the fly so other players could play more D zone time and he would be fresher for O zone time. Aho was also getting more of a green light to be creative and make higher risk plays in the offensive zone more often than pervious would leave him on the ice behind the play a bit or have high danger chance occur while he was on the ice. I imagine Carolina was making this adjustment in order to solve an obvious scoring problem they were having whereas they would dominate possession and get a high shot volume but not score a ton. Something they were well known for. They must have calculated that giving up high danger chances occasionally did not outweigh the additional offence they would achieve with this model. What this does do though is skew the data quite a bit. The data will show that Aho has very low zone exit and possession stats in the D zone and is on the ice for a high amount of high danger chances, but in actuality he is simply being deployed in a way that data cannot pick up. As of yet anyway unless there is a model out there, I am not aware of that can. This too could be what Jeff Blashill was trying to say.

 For more on this check out my show from this morning here