For those of you who listen to the Expected Buffalo Podcast, my fondness of T.J. Brodie as a potential UFA option for the Buffalo Sabres will not come as a surprise. At 30 years old, he is coming off a season where he posted some of the best underlying metrics of his career. If players like Brandon Montour and Ramsus Ristolainen are indeed dealt this offseason, he would be an excellent candidate to serve in the defensive top-four.

As a result of posting fantastic base scoring metrics from 2014-2017 (113 points in 221 games), Brodie is routinely labeled as an “offensive defenseman” by fans and commentators. In reality, his career numbers actually show that he’s been most successful in his own end, suppressing shots at a nine-percent rate over league average since his rookie season.

Over the last two seasons, Brodie’s impact on the Calgary Flames’ blue line was undeniable. On the team’s de facto top-pairing alongside Mark Giordano, he ranks among the top-40 defensemen in the league in terms of xGAR/60 since 2018. He’s also the Flames’ team-leader in five-on-five ice-time during that span, averaging 17:23 per game (21:01 in all situations).

For a player who was already well regarded as a consensus top-four defenseman in the league, 2019-20 may very well have been his best year to date. His relative xGF rate of 2.56 ranked third on the Calgary blue line. He was also the team’s second-ranking relative-Corsi player on defense, earning a mark of 3.19-percent at even-strength (all while holding an OZS-rate of just over 44-percent). His shot-suppression rate of 8.9-percent over-average was also his best individual mark since 2013-14.

Despite almost always being a positive impact player during his nine seasons at the NHL level, there are a few performance inconsistencies in the data. Along with his various strengths, I wanted to focus on those outliers and help get a gauge of what happened to make him sub-optimal.

Brodie is a player who could cause data analysts to initially scratch their heads when looking at his RAPM metrics. Year-over-year there is very little consistency in his individual metrics. On the other hand, while his offensive and defensive xG impacts tend to fluctuate, his overall xGAR and SPAR impacts have actually been very consistent. To put it simply, it might not always look the same, but he almost always finds a way to be a positive presence.

You might notice that the 2017-18 campaign is an outlier year on the above chart. It also represents an extreme outlier in terms of his relative xG (-5.26-percent) and Corsi (-3.92-percent). Every available metric indicates that he struggled that season in a way we hadn’t seen to that point, and haven’t since. I found it bizarre, especially since he seemed to immediately regain his previous impacts the following year, so I dove into the details to see what might have caused it.

The first thing I noticed was that Brodie’s primary defensive partner in 2017-18 was Travis Hamonic. In his career leading up to that point, Hamonic was a perennially strong offensive impact player on the back-end. Sure enough, like Brodie, his individual metrics took an uncharacteristic hit that year.

The next thing I looked at was deployment. Perhaps it was skewed in an unfavorable way. That theory was once again disproven, as they held a pretty favorable OZS rate of 52.98-percent on the year.

Finally, I wondered if perhaps Hamonic was at the beginning of a career decline (which would be odd, considering that he was 27 years old at the time). So, I checked his metrics the following season, and like Brodie, saw a massive performance improvement in 2018-19. So again, nothing doing there.

From 2017-18 to 2018-19, Brodie and Hamonic’s on-ice xG rates increased by 5.47, and 7.14-percent, respectively. The simple likelihood here is that they just didn’t mesh as a pairing. There is nothing in the data that indicates otherwise. As previously stated, it’s tough to fault the Flames coaching staff for trying them out as a duo. Hamonic was historically strong offensively, and Brodie had solid two-way ability. They seemed like a good match.

Where former Flames head coach, Glen Gulutzan failed was his insistence to keep them together, almost exclusively, for the entirety of the season, despite their poor production. Thankfully, the situation was resolved the following season when Bill Peters took over behind the bench, and the two of them got back to their positively impactful ways alongside different partners.

Naturally, there could be concern regarding the fact that Brodie regained his success alongside one of the best two-way NHL defenders in Giordano. That’s valid to an extent. Since 2018-19, he and Brodie have played almost exclusively as a pairing, and you’d be hard-pressed to find a defender with more consistently positive year-over-year metrics than Giordano.

One positive example to help quell that concern is how well Brodie fared alongside Michael Stone, his second-most consistent partner in 2019-20, and one of the most negatively impactful defenders in the league since over the past eight years. Stone’s xGAR rate of -14.3 since 2012-13 is the fourth-lowest combined mark in the NHL among defensemen. His relative xG ratio of -5.66 ranks eighth-worst among the 220 defensemen who have skated at least 1200 minutes since 2017-18.

This past season, Brodie and Stone spent just over 281 minutes together at five-on-five. Together, they registered an xGF percentage of 50.07. On its own, that isn’t very noteworthy, but when you consider the fact that Stone’s xG rate plummeted to 30.99-percent in the 125:36 he spent away from Brodie this season, the partner impact becomes more evident.

It’s only fair to mention that the sample size is still rather small in the grand scheme of things, but given that a vast majority of Brodie’s time was spent with Giordano over the last two seasons, we can only work with the data we have.

According to Evolving Hockey’s contract projection tool, Brodie is expected to command a deal similar to three-years, $4.9 million on the open market. That’s an exceptional value, and his base-scoring reduction in 2019-20 probably has something to do with it.

As has been the case with several of the UFA defenseman profiles we’ve done thus far, this acquisition would be largely contingent on the Sabres moving on from both Montour and Ristolainen. Despite being a left-handed shooter, Brodie prefers to play on the right side of the defense. If that weren’t the case, he’d be a logical addition, even if just one of the aforementioned Buffalo incumbents was sent packing (an increasingly likely scenario).

In terms of fit on the Sabres blue line, we’ve seen the type of success Brodie has experienced in a top-pairing role alongside a marquee two-way player in Giordano. The closest parallel Buffalo currently possesses is Rasmus Dahlin, who could certainly use a viable defensive partner to help him eat big minutes in 2020-21. Since both of them are strong defensive-zone transition defenders, they could be used in a variety of different deployment settings.

At the end of the day, Brodie would essentially be what fans hoped Montour would amount to when he was acquired via trade during the 2018-19 season. Interestingly enough, his projected contract value compares very closely to Montour’s anticipated ask of three-years, $4.8 million AAV.

Any way you slice it, making this “swap” would be a slam-dunk idea, as opposed to overpaying Montour to stay in blue-and-gold. Even if the Sabres would be forced to pay a “bad team tax” and offer Brodie more than his market projection (relating to both term, and AAV), it would still result in an obvious net-add on the back-end.

xGAR and RAPM Charts courtesy of Evolving Hockey

Transition Data and Pairing Chart courtesy of Charting Hockey

Career Shot Heatmap courtesy of Hockeyviz

All referenced advanced metrics courtesy of Natural Stat Trick

Photo Credit: Derek Leung/Getty Images