Justin Holl’s skillset, his underrated value, and his future with the Maple Leafs

Justin Holl was a healthy scratch Wednesday night for the first time this season.

I’m not reading anything into it more than what head coach Sheldon Keefe already said about it: The Maple Leafs were looking to rotate Conor Timmins into the lineup anyway, and Holl’s tough game against Columbus provided an opening.

This isn’t an indication that Holl’s lineup spot has been permanently ceded to Timmins. It makes a lot of sense for the Leafs to rotate players in and out of the lineup, including players like Morgan Rielly and T.J. Brodie, to keep all eight of their defencemen fresh, and to get each player more comfortable with different partners. Per Evolving Hockey, the Leafs have had 10 defensive combinations play at least 90 minutes together, tied for a league-high (with Philadelphia). The average team’s most-used pairing has played 578 minutes together, going into Thursday’s games. The Leafs most-used pairing, Holl and Mark Giordano, has been together just 481 minutes.

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So the Leafs have had to experiment, due to injuries and a lot more depth than anticipated. The Leafs midseason trade for Timmins gave the Leafs another strong option, and now everybody is healthy with the exception of Jake Muzzin, causing a logjam on defence.

None of this is a problem, but it does pose a question for somebody like Holl. He’s 31 years old, in the final year of his three-year contract, and, due to his $2-million salary cap hit, is the obvious candidate to move the other way in a trade if the Leafs need to free up money to make a big addition.

I’m also not suggesting that the Leafs are in a hurry to move off Holl’s salary. If he really wanted to, general manager Kyle Dubas could find a trade partner to take on Holl tomorrow, as 6-foot-3 defencemen who move the puck, kill penalties, and block shots are always in demand around the NHL. I do wonder, though, whether Holl’s dip in performance this season may make the Leafs look to see if they can find a player a bit more reliable for their second pairing.

That’s a very difficult thing to do. Contending teams aren’t in a position to be moving off their difference-makers on defence. The recent slide for the Wild may have them in a position where they’re ready to sell on Matt Dumba, and possibly the Leafs see John Klingberg’s struggles in Anaheim this season as a result of playing in a disorganized system with a bad team. After that, the market is very thin: Sean Walker and Matt Roy from Los Angeles are just lateral moves that are slightly more expensive. Erik Karlsson’s salary cap hit makes him an absolute non-starter. While Luke Schenn is an attractive depth option (everybody loves a comeback), I don’t see him as a player who moves the puck well enough against pressure to be a viable second-pairing option for a good team.

Now, I’m not looking to trade Holl because he was a healthy scratch for one game, but I do want to illustrate how hard it is to replace a player like Holl, despite the fact that Holl is likely playing the weakest hockey of his career. He’s posted career lows in both raw scoring chances for percentage, at 52 percent, and relative scoring chances for percentage, at minus-4 percent.

I’ve manually tracked all of Holl’s puck touches this season, with the exception of two games, and while I don’t have access to previous seasons worth of data, I’m comfortable in saying that Holl has probably been a little weaker this season. He seems to be falling down a bit more and his decision-making is a hair slower than it was when he was in his prime.

Despite this, Holl is still a very strong defender for the Leafs, and one of the underrated players in the sport. His falling 5-on-5 numbers aside, Holl has continued to anchor one of the best penalty-killing units in the NHL. Holl has played 58 percent of the Leafs’ minutes at 4-on-5. The Leafs have given up 50 scoring chances against per 60 minutes (fourth-best in the NHL) and 6.4 goals against per 60 (11th-best). Only Esa Lindell and Jani Hakanpaa of the Stars, and Scott Mayfield of the Islanders play a higher percentage of his team’s minutes for a PK unit better than Toronto’s.

But his puck movement at 5-on-5 is also a strength. Despite the fact that I think he’s a little worse than he was in other years – he is 31 years old, after all – he’s still among the Leafs better players, especially on the back end.

A major difference between the Leafs and their opponents this season is their ability to move the puck with control out of the defensive end. In the games I’ve tracked, the Leafs have exited their defensive zone with control 58 percent of the time, to 54 percent for the opponents. This difference is quite big, as teams that exit the defensive zone with control, by carrying or passing the puck out, are far more likely to get the next entry into the offensive zone.

This is a pretty significant difference league-wide, as well. Corey Sznajder at All Three Zones records things a little differently than I do, but he still ranks the Leafs defence as the group that exits the defensive zone most often with control. As a result, the Leafs attempt more zone entries than any other team, by a very wide margin, according to Corey’s data. A strength of this team in recent years is how it’s able to help the forwards move the puck in the right direction by getting them the puck. It’s vital that all six defencemen in the lineup are strong at passing in the defensive zone.

With that in mind, we have some graphs.

The first shows how well each Leafs defenceman moves the puck out of the defensive zone. Two things matter here: Overall quality of exits (how many of your defensive zone exits are with control of the puck) and quantity (how many defensive zone exits do you get per minute of play). Being in the upper right side of this graph is the best place to be, and anything over the line means the player is better than the team average at moving the puck:

Now, some of you may argue that it’s not a good thing to be exiting the defensive zone all the time, since it means you’re stuck in there a lot. That’s partially true, but it’s pretty rare that a player will play an entire shift and not have the puck go into his end at least once. Mostly what zone exit rate is telling us is how often a player is getting to the puck and touching the puck when it does get in there. The players that touch the puck most often, in all zones, are the true difference makers in hockey.

The above graph also doesn’t mean that T.J. Brodie, Rasmus Sandin, or Giordano are particularly bad at moving the puck. They’re all likely at or better than the NHL average both in total exits rate and in exits with control, but the rest of the Leafs, particularly Holl and Timothy Liljegren, have been very strong at controlled exits and Rielly exits at a very high volume.

The next graph I’ll show is how the Leafs do within the defensive zone, in terms of both turnovers and defensive zone pass completion percentage. Again, being in the upper right is the place to be:

A key criticism of Holl is his turnovers and decisions with the puck, but according to my tracked data, he doesn’t make many more turnovers than the team average. While I’ve tracked more turnovers for Holl than any other Leaf this season, the fact is that I’ve also tracked more defensive zone touches for him than anybody else. Holl is almost always looking to make plays, rather than retreat to the front of his net, which has the veneer of being a safer option but almost always allows the opposition to spend an extra 10 or 15 easy seconds in the offensive zone.

Additionally, Holl is second-best on the Leafs in percentage of defensive zone touches that result in completed passes (this includes puck touches that are basically throwing the puck away, that don’t count as either a complete pass or a turnover). While Holl is slightly worse than the team average for turnovers, his 11 percent turnover rate isn’t a high enough clip that would have me really worried. Only Liljegren’s 13 percent turnover rate is eyebrow-raising, for bad reasons (Timmins just breaking every microstatistical chart I put together is eyebrow-raising as well, but in a good way).

Basically, Holl makes a few more turnovers because he gets a lot of extra touches. I’ve recorded Holl getting more touches following opponents’ missed and saved shots than any other Leafs D, and those touches are usually more difficult for players than when a teammate simply passes them the puck. If you omit the touches that happen immediately following opponents shots, Holl is much better than NHL average both in terms of exiting with control (61 percent, NHL average for D is 51 percent) and turnover percentage (10 percent, NHL average 12 percent).

The one concern I have with Holl is whether “above average” is going to take the Leafs anywhere, especially in the difficult Atlantic Division. The Leafs don’t have the luxury of waiting for the NHL to come to its senses and introduce a more logical playoff format between now and April, so now they need to prepare for the opponents they’ll have to face. Holl’s a better defenceman than anybody the Leafs could conceivably get for the same price (including Timmins – whose high efficiency is balanced out by his low volume), but if Holl’s salary cap hit is standing in the way between the Leafs and potentially difference-making player, either at forward or defence, the team could be tempted to move on and turn his full-time duties to Liljegren. You may hurt your depth in an effort to improve at the top.

Regardless of what the Leafs have in store for Holl, none of that changes what he is: A very strong number four (at worst) defenceman, whose strength at moving the puck in the right direction creates the environment for his team to score goals and win hockey games. The odd awkward puck touch or missed assignment doesn’t change the fact that Holl helps move the needle the right way.

(Photo: Darcy Finley / NHLI via Getty Images)