Will Scheifele’s defensive mediocrity hold the Jets back from Cup contention?

*All statistics for this article are accurate as of January 10th, 2022.

It might come with the territory of the Jets being unable to continue to meet the expectations set from their 2018 Western Conference Final run, but there’s been a growing narrative in the hockeyverse that perhaps Mark Scheifele isn’t the correct guy to be the number one center for a team with Stanley Cup aspirations. Or maybe it’s just twitter. It can be a harsh world out there.

Add that to the fact that the Jets were picked by many (myself included) to have a renaissance of sorts, the fact they sit 10th in the Conference in points percentage will only add speculation. Cup contender? They gotta make round one first.

The major critique with Mr. Scheifele comes from the defensive side of the puck. He’s been an elite talent offensively for quite some time, but still has conversation surrounding him regarding “commitment to playing without the puck” and “not leaving the zone early”. These are topics typically associated with 22 year old players, but Scheif is 28 years old and has a few years of his prime left. Ideally, he’d be at worst a good two-way center at this point, but that just isn’t the case.

Part of the confusion around the Jets also has to do with their Jekyll and Hyde performance in last year’s playoffs. One where they grinded their way to a sweep over the Edmonton Oilers, only to get swept by the Montreal Canadiens and those big mean, top-4 defensemen they iced.

Of course, the viciousness of that Jake Evans hit and the total loss of emotional control in the minutes leading up to that have also put into question his overall composure on the ice. For two straight playoff seasons the Jets have bowed out disappointingly with their number one center on the sidelines, and the second one was purely on Scheif. You can say what you want about the suspension length, but like it or not, that’s a totally different series with him on the ice. And he probably didn’t need to crush him like that.

Complementing all of this is the decline of Blake Wheeler from elite playmaking winger to just “pretty good”. Scheif himself has been an excellent offensive centerman for half a decade, but it’s prudent to remember that from 2013-14 to today, Blake Wheeler sits 8th in total points. That places him 2nd among right wingers, behind only Patrick Kane. Given how attached at the hip those two have been, Scheifele is not immune to his decline. And it doesn’t help that his other wing options, Kyle Connor and Nik Ehlers, aren’t exactly known for their two-way play either.

So I’ve spent some time digging into Scheif’s defensive performance over the last few years, and have tried to understand just how much his offensive output can justify it. I’ve also put some legwork into his underlying metrics this year, where his defensive numbers are quite poor.

Let’s get to it.

As a hopeless fan of the Atlanta Thrashers who was saved by the Jets, I’ve followed the Winnipeg Jets’ first ever draft pick rather closely. I was desperate to see a non lottery pick pan out, and was happy to see Scheif get sent to back to the OHL’s Barrie Colts a few times, after the Thrashers rushed another Barrie Colt – Alex Burmistrov – straight to the NHL. You could see the flashes of Scheif’s ability early on – excellent balance, a great wrist shot – but the frequency of seeing such skills was lower than you wanted.

Scheif then totally broke out, scoring the 7th most even strength points through the 2014-15 to 2016-17 seasons, with 151. (Sidney Crosby leads that timeframe with 178.) It all looked good to me. I was convinced he had the ability to bag 40 goals – a feat he almost accomplished in 2018-19 with 38 – but it seems his highest goal scoring days are behind him, and he’s settled more into a playmaker who still possesses a great shot. Particularly with snipers like Nik Ehlers and Kyle Connor available on the wings.

Which brings me to one of his great assets as a centerman. If he’s playing with a guy like Wheeler, a pure playmaker, Scheif can be the shooter. I love goal scorers, so I always appreciated that that was a part of his skill set, and he looked lethal in the bumper position on the power play for a while. But when he plays with more shoot-first guys, a la Ehlers and Connor, he can just as easily morph into an above average playmaker. One of his greatest attributes is his ability to gain the zone, stop up, and cycle down low or find a guy cutting through the middle. 

After the Jets burst into the Conference Final in 2018, all was well. Scheif was a clear number one center. The team was stacked in every aspect, and I had absolutely zero questions regarding any negative impact Scheif might have on the team. He’ll never be Mr. McDavid, but he worked hard, was a true rink rat, and was always honing his craft. Anyone saying he wasn’t an elite center was just confused, and in need of some physical harm to their face, such as a slap. I also wasn’t “woke” to fancy stats and those underlying metrics that suggest maybe his offensive impact was being muted by poor defense. From what I could tell, Scheifele had lived up to being the team’s first ever pick.

That’s all in the past, however, and the “what have you done for me lately” narrative rings through for many Winnipeg fans nowadays. They’re not a young team anymore, this is a fully developed squad that should be very talented with few holes on paper. So, in order to decipher the Scheifele code, I’ll rely on the great help of Hockey Viz and Evolving Hockey.

Lets start with the good. Honestly, most of what I found is good, but there are valid concerns that we’ll get to. The good is that using Evolving Hockey’s Goals Above Replacement metric (GAR), which is aimed at quantifying both offensive, defensive, and penalty drawing/taking impacts into one singular number, Scheifele has found himself in the top 20 of that metric 3 times in his career. Albeit in a span from from 2015 through 2017, which is a bit in the past at this point. It’s at least comforting to see that he was capable of being in such elite company, meaning we have seen spurts where his defensive/penalty contributions keep up or at least don’t weigh down his prolific offensive talents.

Furthermore, since his first full season in 2013-14, he’s accumulated 111.7 GAR, good for 7th in the entire league, and amusingly, 0.4 ahead of Sean Couturier, who was taken one slot after him in the 2011 draft. That overall number skews a bit toward Scheif though, since numerous excellent players joined the league later than that and have played less games than him. Changing the metric to GAR/60, which will allow the younger generation to compete, Scheif still scores very high in the league with .567 GAR/60, putting him 23rd. For reference, Connor McDavid places 1st at .924, but only 6 players are over .600.

Point is, every which way you slice it, Scheifele is a top centerman in the league, and in 2016-17 he scored the second highest GAR for a centerman behind only Connor Andrew McDavid from Richmond Hill. You may have heard of him.

Of course, there are a few detractors to Scheif, and fancy stats back them up. First off, since 2016 he has a 49.4 shots for percentage, which puts him 276/436 qualified players, firmly cemented in the bottom half of the league. For all of his offensive generation, it’s clear that possession-wise, it is certainly give and take. Opponents shoot more often than he and his linemates do, which isn’t what you want. He does has a 52.6 GF% over that span, placing him 148th in the same sample – surely an improvement – but that is most definitely affected by Connor Hellebuyck’s wizardry and the fact he’s always had an impressive cast of players to play with. Scheif is also a very good finisher himself, and may be influencing that in a positive way as well.

For visual hockey fans, Hockey Viz has an interesting graphic that uses expected goals for/against. Expected Goals For/Against (xGF or xGA) takes into account the location of the shot, type of shot, whether it was off the rush, had lateral movement from a pass, or was rebound, among other things. It’s a singular metric that determines how much offense you’re creating or, on the defensive end, allowing. Hockey Viz provides a telling long-term tale of Scheifele’s impact on both sides of the puck, using 5v5 xGF/xGA rates and comparing them to league average.

The first smoothed graph tells you about his offense, with xGF/60. The second his defense with xGA/60. If you’re below the white horizontal line, or 0, you’re in the bottom half of the league, and the corresponding percentiles on the right tell you all you need to know.

Which is that Scheifele has been at or below league average defensively basically his entire career. My guess is that troubling dip in 2019-20 is directly related to the dismantling of almost the entire defensive unit (thanks for staying Josh!), but that is mere speculation. Funnily enough though, the last year and a half or so he has been above average, in the 65-70th percentile range, which is (for me anyway) when his defensive abilities – or lack thereof – have been called into question. Of course, Scheif has also been in very healthy percentiles offensively his entire career, which supports all the “pro-Scheifele” arguments I outlined earlier.

The final, entirely concerning table I put together shows that perhaps somehow, Scheifele’s defensive game is getting worse. It could also mean that his offensive game is so good that GAR is having a hard time keeping up, but that may be a stretch.

This table shows Scheifele’s league ranking among forwards for both points and GAR, with the 3rd column being the difference between the two. A positive “Difference” number is when his GAR ranking outperforms his points ranking, suggesting his defensive game has kept him elevated enough to let his offensive contributions shine. A negative number means, despite high point totals, his GAR ranking is being held back by poor defensive metrics.

The trouble is that early in his career you see all that green – both in GAR ranking and Difference. Despite not finishing in the top 30 in league scoring, Scheifele still ranks top 20 in GAR in 2015-16 and 2014-15. As Scheifele’s points ranking has climbed, unfortunately it hasn’t necessarily correlated to his GAR climbing, except for that exceptional 2016-17 season where he placed top 10 in both metrics.

Either way, the trend is very concerning. Centermen generally tend to get better defensively as they age, not worse. With that being said, despite that trend, it is prudent to note that being in the top 100 in GAR isn’t bad. That’s the top third of forwards in the league. It’s his GAR not keeping up with his points ranking that I find concerning.

So that encompasses a pretty good amount of his career, and uses larger samples that provide us with meaningful data.

But what about this year?

Admittedly, it was against Vegas earlier in the month when Michael Amadio broke the 0-0 tie off a rebound that prompted my idea to write this article. Note where Scheifele is, and that he only tries to tie up Amadio’s stick when the shot comes, not because you should always tie up an opponent’s stick near your own net. Especially if you don’t have body position, which Scheifele doesn’t. Well, it was too late.

No one carries their hard hat around and tries to put it on right when they look up and see a brick falling. You put it on beforehand.

This is one example, but with the narrative around Scheif, I’ve been trying to watch him a lot more in the defensive zone and trying to understand more of where the criticism is coming from. With so few games of late, I haven’t exactly been able gather as much spectating as I’d like, but I do notice cheating tendencies and a hesitancy to play hard on defense unless it’s urgent, like he was slow to do on Amadio’s goal. Preventing that goal really isn’t skill, it’s will. Which seems to be rather inconsistent for our subject today.

Given the lack of games to do my own recent eye test, I’m going to continue to rely on the indispensable Hockey Viz. Below, you’ll see data for this current season. The gap in each graph is when he missed time from covid protocol early in the season. Using their xGF and xGA models, they’ve created this incredibly telling visual:

Where the first graph shows Scheifele’s most common linemates in each game, and the second graph shows xGF and xGA in a smoothed line graph. Areas shaded red are bad. Areas shaded grey are good.

Annnnnd….

That’s a lot of red. In fact, it’s mostly red. And it lines up primarily with him having Connor and Wheeler as linemates per the top graph. Having xGF/GA rates at or above 3.5 is pretty high, and signals high event, “fun to watch” hockey that coaches hate. Unless, of course, it’s just your xGA that’s high, then it means you are being completely dominated. He spends a good 10 game chunk above 4 xGA, which is terrible. Despite that icky amount of red shading, Scheif’s actual goals for and against for the season lands at 23 for and 22 against, so he’s either been really lucky, plays with excellent finishing talent, or has a fantastic goaltender. It’s likely a combination of all three.

Admittedly, as a writer I’m still learning just how much stock to put into these expected goals/against models. But they are generated by incredibly smart people, and they help me define a narrative based on things other than just what I see and what raw goals, assists, and shots say.

Scheifele has also been totally caved in with Connor as his linemate, but has done much better with Copp or Ehlers. I’m hoping that’s something interim coach Dave Lowry utilizes, especially since Dubois and Connor have been clicking so well on their own. It’s always nice to have a balanced attack.

This table illustrates the point, showing very concerning xGA metrics with Wheeler and Connor, while playing him with two-way players such as Stastny or Copp is lowering the xGA without a terrible sacrifice in offense. Yes, the xGF is the worst with Copp, but is also one of the only positive differentials.

Alright, all these numbers and graphs are makin’ my head spin. Let’s wrap this thing up.

Scheifele may never become Ryan O’Reilly or Patrice Bergeron in terms of combining offensive prowess with defensive acumen. Okay, there’s no way in hell he will. But the entire premise of this article is “can he propel the Jets toward the Stanley Cup”? And in answering that, I’ve generally been looking at datasets from either 2014 through now, or 2016 through now. Huge samples that completely destroy any “small sample bias”. And in my opinion, the data does suggest that his offensive ability is “worth it”.

But screw sample size for one minute. We’re gonna talk playoffs here. And in my opinion Scheifele’s playoff record is extraordinary. Let’s not forget that in that 2017 playoff run, Scheifele scored 14 goals in 17 games, en route to the franchise’s first appearance in the Western Conference Final. People don’t score 14 playoff goals unless you’ve made the Finals and played 23+ games. Unless you’re Mark Scheifele:

Talk about performing when it counts. And in round 1 during last year’s Canadian division playoffs, he did exactly what we’ve all been so skeptical that he could do, completely shutting down Leon Draisatl and Connor McDavid, the same year that McDavid scored a ridiculous 105 points in 56 games. As usual, I’m sure Hellebuyck helped, but it was a very impressive display. 

So look, Scheifele is an imperfect centerman. But he has excellent abilities to protect the puck and gains the zone with possession often. His ability to shift between nifty playmaker and lethal shooter are an underrated skillset, and I think all those things outweigh any defensive shortcomings. Of course, as fans we want it all and we want the perfect player, but ya can’t always get what ya want. And let’s not forget that the Stanley Cup is won in the playoffs, where Scheif has been nothing short of a beast. So long as the Jets can make the cut by game 82 and join the gauntlet that is the Stanley Cup playoffs, the Jets will be just fine with Scheifele as their number one center. 

As long as Jake Evans isn’t on the opposing roster.

Data collected from Evolving Hockey, Hockey Viz, NHL.com, and HockeyDB.

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