An Autopsy of the Winnipeg Jets: Brenden Dillon and Neal Pionk
A series of postmortem analyses of the 2023-24 Winnipeg Jets
We continue our series on the 2023-24 Winnipeg Jets, breaking down the individual players, their performance, and whether they could be a piece in a future championship Jets team. Today we look at Brenden Dillon and Neal Pionk.
Brenden Dillon: Regular Season Performance
Brenden Dillon has long carried a solid defensive impact while playing a physical and punishing style of hockey. What many did not see coming was an offensive breakout in Winnipeg.
Dillon had only surpassed 17 points twice in his storied career, but he scored 20, 22, and 20 points in Winnipeg. He scored eight goals this year, the most of any pro-season, including the AHL.
He even had strong offense in underlying metrics:
Hockey Viz’s synthetic goal (sG) model suggests that Dillon led the Jets to create about 3% more expected goals (xG) than the league average. Bowness rarely changed his top-four defensive makeup for about 90% of the season, so there’s a large dose of salt in any results. That said, it’s interesting to see how much of the Jets' offense came from the left side in the 5v5 offense heat map (top left)… not the right.
One thing to note: Normally, I’d discount poor special teams' results for a player on the Jets because I believe a lot is symptomatic of coaching, but Dillon has rarely performed above average while short-handed.
Regardless of some confounding variables or not, the overall output for Dillon was right along the lines of what to expect from him in recent seasons. Dillon has consistently provided top-four level results in his defensive role, further showing how analytics are about results, not style.
That said, we should not expect career years in finishing for a career below-average finisher to continue into the future. Dillon scored eight goals when given an average finishing talent we’d expect 3.8 goals for his number and location of shots.
It was fun to follow and cheer for throughout the season.
Dillon, along with Dylan DeMelo, was coach Rick Bowness’ favorite defensive specialist. No player saw their ice time increase more during late and close leads. He saw fewer offensive zone starts than any of the other top-four defenders. While the Morrissey-DeMelo pair saw the opposition’s top lines slightly more, the Dillon pairing did this intentionally while playing with the Adam Lowry line as a five-man unit.
I should note that Dillon typically had a negative impact on most of his defensive partners, but that shouldn’t be too surprising given DeMelo and Pionk were mostly playing with Josh Morrissey when separated from Dillon.
I don’t know how, but while editing the previous article, I had this same graphic in the playoff section when it’s the regular season (hence the 82 games tracked).
I do want to emphasize how well the Jets’ three primary defensive defenders (Dillon, DeMelo, and Dylan Samberg) performed in these metrics. I would focus more on denials over retrievals. Also, while small samples, in the post-season, I did add puck recoveries as well which separated Dillon and DeMelo from Samberg in performance.
Neal Pionk: Regular Season Performance
If you’re paying attention, thus far, the Jets look pretty good. Connor Hellebuyck and Laurent Brossoit were elite for their roles, and so was Josh Morrissey. Dylan DeMelo was underrated but still a good top-four defender, as was Brenden Dillon.
That looks really good…
This season wasn’t great for Neal Pionk. The Jets did well enough defensively at 5v5 with Pionk, surprisingly enough. The Jets were a tad porous with him on the ice, but he did play some fairly tough minutes.
The issue was that everything else was pretty disastrous. Pionk was a staple on the first and second penalty kill units, and the Jets were much worse during those minutes than with him on the bench.
What’s worse was that as an “offense specialist,” Pionk provided very little offense. The Jets created almost nothing with Pionk on the ice, and the little they did was all along the perimeter. Heck, Pionk was almost outscored by DeMelo, who saw no power play ice time.
That’s not all though. Looking at all the evidence together, it seems like a pretty rough season for Pionk. But it was actually his best analytical performance over the past three seasons.
“On paper,” and I use quotation marks intentionally, many would think Dillon is the perfect defensive partner for Pionk, in the same vein as DeMelo for Morrissey. Bowness tried to balance his lines with one offensive specialist and one defensive specialist.
The issue is that Pionk doesn’t provide enough offense to succeed in his role.
I have a theory behind all of this, both why this pairing did not work as some would expect, but also why people assumed wrongly.
If you look at the RAPM results, you see that Pionk’s offensive metrics look dramatically better as you move from shot volume only (Corsi), adding shot quality (xG), and adding finishing/setting (goals).
My theory is that Pionk is good in the offensive zone, but poor at getting there and staying there. His poor transition efficiency leads to less zone time and so he starts behind, and his offensive talents are already handicapped.
My manual tracking of the Jets’ zone exits would also support this theory.
Dillon and Pionk were the most common defenders for Bowness to start shifts in the defensive zone. They were also among the worst puck movers for efficiency to get out of the defensive zone.
Playoff Performance
A quick overview of weighted shots, wShots, are simply Corsi (all shot attempts), but goals are worth more than non-goal shots, and I regress those goals by their xGoal rates.
It’s an empirically informed way of combining all three models: Corsi, xGoal, and goal differential.
As I mentioned before, no Jet should get a passing grade. However, there were not many that performed worse than Pionk. His actual goal differential wasn’t that bad, but predominately due to some lucky circumstances —in my opinion— early on in the series. He was “analytically lucky” as well given how poorly he was out shot and out chanced.
Dillon was much better, or really much less worse. He was still significantly out shot and out chanced, but not by the same extent despite mostly playing together.
Summary
As I mentioned at the start of Neal Pionk’s Regular Season section, the Jets start off looking pretty good. They had generationally elite goaltending. Morrissey is a great number one defender, and DeMelo and Dillon can be half of a contending team’s top-four.
Pionk was the individual that stood out like a sore thumb in the Jets’ top four. Given the Jets’ deployment, Bowness’ tendencies, and the trio of Morrissey, DeMelo, and Dillon, what you’d want is another solid puck-moving defender with offensive chops. This defender should be your second best, or at worst your third best, on your blue line.
Arguably, Pionk wasn’t even the fifth-best defender on the team. I’d put Samberg ahead, and I’d even make a case for Nate Schmidt. This even ignores the much better but was never used Colin Miller.
Good on Bowness to knock down Pionk from his regular number two position in ice time, but it wasn’t enough.
So, we’re at a weird crossroads.
Dillon and DeMelo were good enough to be a #3 and #4 on a contending team, but Pionk was not despite it being his best season in three years. However, Dillon and DeMelo are unrestricted free agents, Pionk has a $5.875 million AAV for one more season, and Winnipeg is limited on room with hefty raises for their top line center and starting goaltender.
They also have Nate Schmidt, who was better than Pionk but in much, much more sheltered deployment, and also carries a large cap hit with $5.95 AAV.
Meanwhile, the team doesn’t even have their second line center situation figured out.
That said, Evolving Hockey’s contract projections estimate the most likely contract for Dillon is a two year, $2.5 million AAV signing. That would be quite low risk and definitely something to look at if I were the Jets.
If it was as easy as an NHL video game, you somehow move out Schmidt and Pionk to afford keeping Dillon and DeMelo. You then try to see if you can pick up someone like Sean Walker or Alex Carrier to take Pionk’s spot. Then you have Ville Heinola fighting Logan Stanley for that third pair spot with Samberg… or better yet, substitute Elias Salomonsson for Stanley.
But, it’s not that easy; it’s not fantasy hockey.
SERIES THUS FAR
Up next: The rest of the defensive group
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