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Luca Sbisa will return to lineup Wednesday vs. Jets
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Thomas Drance
Nov 18, 2015, 17:00 ESTUpdated:
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Photo Credit: Anne-Marie Sorvin/USA TODAY Sports
The Vancouver Canucks will get their most physical defenseman back in the lineup on Wednesday night.
Luca Sbisa, 25, is due to return to the lineup to play his first game in the month of November, the club announced. Though the stay-at-home defender’s performance is often ridiculed in the Vancouver market, some of it is fair and more of it isn’t, the club has performed poorly in his absence.
Sbisa’s return to the lineup will send his countryman Yannick Weber to the press box, and will scramble up Vancouver’s power-play combinations, which may be a good thing at this point.
Here’s what I wrote earlier this week on Luca Sbisa’s performance by the underlying numbers over at Sportsnet.ca:
Sbisa was in the middle of the pack among Canucks defenders by most of the shot-based metrics when he was in the lineup earlier in the year. Small-sample shot-attempt differential is also too blunt of a tool and we should be reticent to draw too much from what it indicates about a player whose ostensible value is derived from being responsible on in-zone play.
With those qualifiers in mind, it’s not a good sign that the Canucks have surrendered even-strength goals at a higher rate with Sbisa on the ice than they have with any other regular defenceman this season.
It’s also concerning that where Sbisa and his most regular defensive partner, rookie Ben Hutton, have been outscored two-to-one and drilled on the shot clock in their 85 minutes together, Hutton has been entirely excellent in his minutes with other Canucks defencemen.
I went on to conclude that the Canucks may have missed Sbisa in shorthanded situations, but that, based on my reading of the underlying numbers, the physical Swiss-born defenseman isn’t among the club’s six-best defenders in 5-on-5 situations.
I’ll stand by that analysis, though I’d mention that I saw some more granular data when I was in the Sportlogiq office in Montreal this week that offered, perhaps, a somewhat different perspective:
There were a few other numbers that flattered Sbisa – no, really! – but that data is proprietary and I’d be uncomfortable sharing it in this space. I’ll probably write about it later in the week over at Sportsnet.ca.
In discussing Sbisa’s absence with Canucks general manager Jim Benning earlier on in this road trip, Vancouver’s general manager used an interesting turn of phrase to describe Sbisa’s value. He called him a “cycle-stopping defenseman”.
I thought that description was pretty interesting because it’s old school, but probably more refined than the old “crease clearing” denomination that was bestowed on cinder-block defenders like Douglas Murray in the past. If possession matters, then disrupting the opposition’s possession game surely matters. It’s not quite as ephemeral. From some of the data I saw this week, I think Benning’s description carries weight. 
The Canucks defense corps has been much maligned this season, but I don’t know that they’re unduly responsible for the club’s recent struggles. I’d even go so far as to suggest that Vancouver’s defense has performed at a level that’s perhaps above what we might reasonably expect from the sum of its parts through the first quarter of the campaign. 
During his Canucks tenure Sbisa hasn’t been helpful in the area that I personally care about most: his contributions to the act of outscoring opponents at even-strength have been negative. 
Without him though, Vancouver’s defense has been a bit one-dimensional, and I’m obstinate about the fact that he’ll help the Canucks penalty kill, even though reasonable people who are smarter than me would disagree.

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