[Wild About Numbers]: Should The Wild Sign Any Of The UFA Defencemen Left On The Market?

Apparently the Wild are still looking for a "physical" defenceman to replace Stoner, but Chuck Fletcher is concerned by how bare the market is and how much players like that have been overpaid so far. This means he could go the trade route to fill that role, but if he decides to take a harder look at the UFAs available, he might find there are some decent options left, both in the "physical" mold and the regular just-a-good-defenceman mold.

To get a quick read on how good these guys are, I decided to use "dCorsi". As I said yesterday, basically, dCorsi uses all the contextual/deployment factors for a player, regresses the numbers and comes up with an "Expected Corsi" number. A player's dCorsi is that Expected Corsi vs Actual Corsi. So what it shows is the amount a player is over or under-performing the expected results based on their usage.

(There are a couple of Leafs bloggers working on this stuff separately using slightly different formulas. @MimicoHero published his data last week and Steve Burtch from Pension Plan Puppets should have his up somewhere in the near future).

-Here is the list of remaining UFA defencemen ranked by their dCorsi Rel rating in 2013/14:

-Here's the updated list with more details:

Before starting my main analysis, I looked a bit closer at the year-to-year numbers for McBain, Butler and Diaz to see if their average was being skewed by one bad year in an otherwise decent career:

-That leaves us with 7 defencemen to consider. Here's how they've performed year-to-year (open in new tab to see full size):

So, now that we've narrowed this down to the 3 best canddidates, it's time to figure out which one is the best fit for the Wild.

-Here is their year-to-year dCorsi rel compared:

-Here's how each defenceman has scored at 5v5 over a couple of different time periods and where they ranked among other defencemen around the league: