Erik Karlsson Wants To Play For A Winner. But Can A Winner Use Erik Karlsson?

The league's top defenseman has made a career of putting up flashy numbers on bad teams.

If Erik Karlsson’s career could be distilled into a few days, this week provided such exemplification. On Monday, Karlsson won the NHL’s ultimate award for defensemen — the Norris Trophy — on the basis of his stellar individual numbers last season: 25 goals, 76 assists and 101 points, the first time a blueliner eclipsed the century mark since Brian Leetch in 1991-92 (and just the 15th time it ever happened). But just a day earlier, Karlsson had asked to be traded from the San Jose Sharks to a team with a chance to win the Stanley Cup. Clearly, the personal production and the team concept were at odds with each other.

The paradox of Karlsson has always been about squaring his outstanding play with the usually-underwhelming quality of his teams. During the span of his career, Karlsson has easily been the league’s best offensive defenseman by adjusted Goals Above Replacement — nearly 20 net goals clear of No. 2 Brent Burns, his former teammate — and he ranks fourth in overall adjusted GAR behind Burns, Drew Doughty and Victor Hedman. But the average winning percentage of his teams¹ (44.4%) is by far the worst among the game’s elite D-men since he made his NHL debut in the 2009-10 season.

Karlsson did make a couple of conference final runs in his career, once with the Senators (in 2017, when Ottawa came within a Chris Kunitz double-OT winner of playing for the Cup) and once with the Sharks (in 2019, when San Jose took 2 of 3 from St. Louis to start the series before dropping 3 straight). But even those teams painted a confusing picture of Karlsson’s value: The ‘17 Sens had a below-average offense and a negative overall goal differential despite Karlsson finishing 2nd in Norris voting, and the ‘19 Sharks were the best team Karlsson ever played for despite him missing 29 games and having one of the lowest outputs of his career to that point, statistically.

Over the course of his NHL career, there has been very little correlation between how much Karlsson has produced and how well his teams end up doing. That goes both on offense — which, despite being Karlsson’s calling card, has seen his best years coincide with decently above-average attacks at best, and bad ones (like this year) at worst — and overall, where Karlsson’s well-documented defensive liabilities make it hard for him to elevate a blueline group at that end.

There’s no doubt that this trend is a lot bigger than just Karlsson. His best teammates have been an aging Craig Anderson in net, Jason Spezza at forward and Burns for a handful of seasons on the blueline, but otherwise it was a lot of Zack Smith, Chris Neil, Kevin Labanc and Cody Ceci. In a sport like hockey, one player can only do so much. (Connor McDavid has never made a Stanley Cup Final, for goodness’ sake.)

But I’ve also been wondering if there is a legitimate question about team construction as it pertains to Karlsson and his quest to play for a contender: Are teams whose best offensive players are defensemen somehow different from those who go the usual route and ask their forwards to carry the scoring load? If that is true, then maybe it would explain the disconnect between Karlsson’s individual stats and his teams’ ability to convert that to wins.

So I looked into it for every NHL team since the 1967 expansion ended the Original Six era. I gathered two sets of teams — those whose best offensive player (according to adjusted offensive GAR) was a forward, and those whose best offensive player was a defenseman. To help control for the quality of those players, I also filtered the team leader’s adjusted OGAR to be between 15 and 21 net goals per 82, which gave us a D-led group with an average top offensive player of 17.2 OGAR and a forward-led group with an average of 17.5. So how do the unconventional, defense-led offenses do compared with their more typical counterparts?

To my surprise, the teams in our sample who were led by offensive defensemen tended to have better offenses than those led by forwards. And while they were slightly worse defensively relative to average, that wasn’t enough of an offset to pull the forward-led teams ahead on goal differential overall. Simply put, my hypothesis that offenses underperform when powered by elite defensemen appears to be completely wrong.

That’s good news for Karlsson’s case to join a contender — and for the argument that he simply hasn’t had the teammates to consistently win with, rather than there being a fundamental defect in the premise of building a winner around him.

Perhaps the real hurdle for Karlsson’s quest in that regard, then, is just the 8-year, $92 million contract extension he signed with San Jose after that 2019 playoff run. Karlsson’s current $11.5M annual cap hit leads all defensemen, and adding it would run counter to how GMs operate in the NHL’s COVID-era financial environment of modest salary cap increases at best. Making a Karlsson deal work under the cap would likely require San Jose retaining a record amount of salary, which could then raise the asking price for whichever team wants him.

In other words, balancing all of those factors won’t be easy. But the chance to see Karlsson shed his empty-stats history and prove he can elevate a team to a Stanley Cup level could be worth it — and it would be a lot of fun to watch.

Filed under: NHL

1. Weighted by the number of games he played for each team, each season.