What you are trying to do, as always, is make a metric be the sole standard of judgement. That is faulty. You are excluding the obvious, that he was kept away at all opportunities for the opposition's top players and that are trying present a purely quantitative statistic while ignoring all qualitative evidence.
Going to guess here that you are using Offensive Zone Start ratio here or Zone Start Ratio. The former is faulty and the latter, while better, is not without its shares of issues. If it is the former, then you are including neutral zone face offs in your denominator. That will skew your numbers. If you were looking to compare the amount of offensive zone face offs to defensive zone face offs, then you would eliminate all neutral zone face offs from the equation. But of course, if you to be a shut down defenseman, how can you possible ignore play in the neutral zone?
Zone Start Ratio is not without its sets of issues. That is just for the start of the play. It does not measure when a player is pulled from the ice or when another player comes over the boards. So if a team gets called for icing, the coach has no choice but to keep the players on the ice, but can quickly remove them from the ice and put better defensive players on as soon as possible. It also does not account for shift time, as in how gassed the other players are and the coach has no choice but to keep certain players on the ice.
We could go on and on here, but the sole point that I am making is that utilizing a metric as the sole source of evidence does not a strong argument make. You need to take them with their grain of salt and occasionally use that hated thing of actually watching what is going on in the game to add to the depth of your argument. Otherwise, you get a completely laughable (truly no offense) result. Like Yandle being a shut down defenseman. I can't speak for everyone, but I would wager that NO ONE that works for the NHL sees Yandle as such a player.
