As cutting edge as the contemporary NHL is with robust data analytics and biometric tracking a few constants remain: Every story impacts the Toronto Maple Leafs, overtime playoff hockey is the pinnacle of sport, and big mobile defensemen are unicorns.
In assembling a team for international play, it’s natural for decision makers for the various federations to lean on what they know. In the case of Team Canada general manager Doug Armstrong, that’s size on the back end. Armstrong’s St. Louis Blues won the Stanley Cup back in 2019 with a core of Alex Pietrangelo, Colton Parayrko, Jay Bouwemeester, Vince Dunn, Joel Edmundsson, and Roberto Bortuzzo. The average height and weight of those six defensemen checks in at 6-foot-3 and 213 pounds.
It’s a bit of a red herring to suggest that Travis Sanheim of the Philadelphia Flyers is solely on team Canada for his size. While there are other candidates with better counting stats like Evan Bouchard of the Edmonton Oilers and star rookie Matthew Schaefer of the New York Islanders, it’s important to clarify just how high the threshold for representing Canada at the Olympics is. For stakeholders like Armstrong, ties go to the experienced and familiar.
Sanheim might seem like an unorthodox selection to don the Maple Leaf in international play because of his career trajectory. But, over the course of the winding road that dates back to being drafted back in 2014, Sanheim has evolved into a true minutes-eating matchup defenseman. This isn’t a defensive defensemen in the way talking heads on national tv intermission panels talk about them, this is an actively good defender with strong physical traits beyond taking up space.
Big Boy Minutes
There is no bigger endorsement from a coach and organization to a player than ice time. It’s the single most valuable currency and Sanheim is absolutely rolling in it. He’s the Flyers most used defenseman, he plays 19:54 of even strength minutes per game, the 17th most minutes of any player in the entire NHL.
Slowly but surely since Sanheim made his NHL debut, the Elkhorn, Manitoba native has climbed up the organizational pecking order. The volume of roster turnover the last several years in Philadelphia is nothing to sneeze at. Sanheim has outlasted a variety of blueliners that at one point or another had more organizational equity than he did. The idea of the matchup defenseman may be evolving as the abundance of elite puck moving, power-play quarterback, and true ice-tilters spread across the league, but for the Flyers, no one plays a more challenging role than Sanheim.
According to PuckIQ.com, the Flyers top defenseman spends upwards of 41 percent of his ice time matched up against the other team’s best players. PuckIQ categorizes players into elite, middle and grit. The year-to-year qualifiers for each category move because the criteria for formulating the cohorts is in part based on production for that given season. For context, Quinn Hughes spends 34.5, Cale Makar 37.2 and Adam Fox spends 39.2 percent respectively against elite competition.
That in of itself should indicate just how important Sanheim’s defense is to the Flyers’ plan as a team. In another world where Philadelphia was a little more offensively inclined and looking to extract more counting stats from Sanheim, he could potentially dial back the matchup minutes he plays and have more favorable game situations to drive offense.
The traditional minutes eating defenseman is comparable to treading water. They’re not drowning, they’re actively kicking their feet and churning water with their arms to keep their head above the water. World class swimmers can tread water for extremely long periods of time. However, they do need to eventually get out of the water because the lactic acid buildup becomes too much to overcome.
At 6-foot-4 and 222 pounds, Sanheim is the evolution of the minutes eating role. The blueliner is amongst the fastest skaters in the NHL at his position in terms of both top and functional speed. The NHL’s EDGE tool tracks player movement through a chip in their equipment to log both distance covered and how fast they’re moving.
It’s a fair caveat to say that there aren’t a ton of game situations where a defenseman is going to be flat out top speed, but Sanheim does demonstrate high end skating across the board. Skating at a high level is an integral tool for today’s NHL defenseman where the average foot speed of forwards is faster than ever and Sanheim’s blend of speed and his size makes him an anomaly.
I don’t make the comparison lightly because of the career the aforementioned Bouwmeester had, but the parallels are direct. Bouwmeester’s unique blend of high-end skating at his height enabled him to carve out a 17-year career and 1240 games.
The production
There are hundreds if not thousands of physically talented hockey players that have great traits. The NHL draft is seven rounds and there are no stones left unturned anymore. If you’re a high-end hockey player somewhere in the world, in today’s digital age, you’ll be found and given an opportunity to ply your craft under the stewardship of an NHL franchise. It’s one thing to have the physical traits, it’s another to channel them into actively helping your team win games.
For Sanheim to still be producing the underlying numbers he is while playing a high volume of matchup minutes is extremely impressive and why he’s an outlier. In Sanheim’s 772:52 of even strength play this year, the Flyers are outscoring opponents 37-31. What’s even more impressive is that in those minutes, the Flyers are enjoying 51.09 and 53.55 percent of expected goals and high danger chances respectively.
Not only is Sanheim being tasked with a challenging workload, the Flyers are managing to create dangerous offense in that time as well.
The high danger chance area around the net front is where shot attempts are most likely to result in goals. The value for high danger chances is based on historical shot tracking data, so the more often a scoring chance from that location has resulted in a goal, the more likely future attempts are. The one carve out in measuring the quality of offense is that these metrics cannot account for individual shooting talent yet.
If the Flyers could get slightly better goaltending in Sanheim’s 5-on-5 minutes as well (895.3) that goal share could be even better. But, based on the quality of competition, it’s logical that opponents are able to score at a higher percentage while Sanheim is on the ice than the Flyers’ team average of 906.3 at even strength.
The Devil you know
It wouldn’t be fair to solely make the case for Sanheim without acknowledging his contemporaries. Both Schafer and Bouchard are amongst the most dynamic blue liners in the entire NHL capable of massively titling the ice in their teams’ favor from the back end. This is a best-on-best hockey tournament where in a hypothetical game with the United States or Sweden, the team’s high-end players will largely play each other to a push. That’s where the quality of depth becomes so important and why it’s reasonable to favor offense first players.
In the case of this specific version of Team Canada, it’s very clear the decision makers had a vision for the roster. The fact that the leadership didn’t change a single one of the eight defensemen it brought to last year’s 4 Nations Faceoff competition meant that it was always going to be an uphill battle for someone new to get into the mix.
Sanheim’s workload at 4 Nations wasn’t crazy playing 30:28 at even strength across two games. But, in that ice time, Canada enjoyed 62 percent of the scoring chances, 63 percent of the shots on goal, 73 percent of the expected goals and 83 percent of the high danger chances. That is outright utter domination. That type of performance, even in a limited sample surely stuck with the decision makers for Canada.
Subjective exercises like roster assembly are always going to produce blind spots. Armstrong has the experience of winning the 4 Nations Faceoff and the 2019 Stanley Cup as tangible proof that his ideas about what it takes to win are right. For Sanheim, that means an opportunity to represent Canada in pursuit of its tenth Olympic Gold Medal in Olympic hockey.
Most of all, it’s a validation of Sanheim’s development as a player since his debut back in 2017. To outlast multiple coaching changes, organizational overhauls and roster life cycles and come out on the other side as a franchise building block is an impressive accomplishment. While the Flyers still have work to do in assembling a contender, it can feel good knowing that it has one of the league’s preeminent minutes eating defenseman.
