I think when it comes to defensemen evaluations you have to consider their contexts, too. I think you can throw quality of competition out for all the minute eaters since they're not getting hidden, but deployment is important to look at. Karlsson, Klingberg, OEL for example--straight offensive time. NO/little PK, TONS of PP time--Ek will sit for 4 minutes at a time to be fresh on the other side of a PK for offense. I think voters and pundits around the league don't pay attention to the idea that it's impressive that guys like Suter, Doughty, Josi/Weber play massive PK minutes in addition to 5v5 and PP too. Obviously you want to play to the offensive talents, but that inflates their numbers compared to the deployment of the all-around defensive studs.
In addition, GA, GF, things like that--they're nice comparative tools but it's important to look at in relation to their team too. the reason EK is shocking to me is that he's mid/bottom tier on his team in terms of GF%--that is, the percentage of goals for versus goals against scored when he's on the ice. He's scoring lots, but he's BLEEDING goals, even compared to all his teammates. That's bad. Doughty, meanwhile, is the 2nd d-man on the Kings, 6th overall on the Kings, but only tenths of a percentage behind his usual partner McNabb. And actually, lots of the top D-men are in EK's area--like Weber, Josi, etc.--which you can say is because of big, tough minutes to an extent, so why is Doughty so good at that and =/-?
These are questions Norris voters don't typically ask. I'm genuinely surprised there's not a half-decent "defensive performance" formula yet because there are so many moving parts that it's difficult to evaluate these guys appropriately (publicly, anyway; I'm sure the individual teams have their own assessments).
I dunno, I'm a defenseman myself, so I always watch and wonder these things more than most.
Informative and persuasive post.
