Defending Justin Schultz, who can't defend himself (Trending Topics)

The Edmonton Oilers floated the idea this week that apart from a certain No. 97, there might not be too many untradeable guys on the roster.

It makes sense. They're continuing an organizational overhaul that began either last year or like a decade ago, depending upon how you want to look at it, and given the quality of the team you can see where there's room for frustration.

The other issue, though, is that there are some pretty damn good players on the roster, demonstrably so. Taylor Hall is fantastic and Peter Chiarelli would be foolish to trade him unless a deal absolutely blew him out of the water. I don't know that such a deal exists, but let's say they might want to be open to the idea. This is also true of Ryan Nugent-Hopkins. Probably Leon Draisaitl as well. Everyone else, you figure Chiarelli is at least in “Make me an offer” mode.

Again, it's perfectly reasonable that this is your stance if you're Chiarelli, because it's another year where a top-3 pick is coming, and you're sitting in the catbird seat for Auston Matthews. That and many other trade chips may allow you to get more competitive more quickly if you are so inclined.

One player whose name has more or less constantly been in Oilers-related trade rumors for the last few years is, of course, Justin Schultz.

He's a defenseman who came in with way too much hype — he torched the AHL with some mega-talented players during the lockout — and who was still receiving it despite mountains of evidence that he should not as recently as summer 2014, when now-former GM Craig MacTavish said Schultz had “Norris Trophy potential.”

That assertion probably wasn't that much more laughable than it is now, but it's easy to convince yourself that bad young players with a very obvious talent level (which suggests they should be better) are in fact better than they've shown.

The premise of a player's promise looms large over just about anyone under the age of 24, and often you hear about it even if they're breaking into the league at 26 or 27 years old. “He's still learning the game at this level,” and so on, has been applied to guys as clearly not-good as Kevan Miller in recent seasons, as a justification for their continued use. But Miller is clearly just running around getting clubbed out there, and has no clear offensive panache in his game.

This is not true of Schultz, who has a lot of tools in his offensive toolbox but has never really put them together into anything cogent.

This could, of course, be said of just about any Oilers defenseman since Chris Pronger left town. You can blame any number of issues you like, but organizationally and for years, this is a club that simply hasn't been able to play a lick of defense. Doesn't matter about who's behind the bench or who's in the lineup on a nightly basis; the Oilers have finished in the bottom-nine in goals allowed in every full season since 2007-08. So one wonders if the nearly 250 games of data we have on Schultz is in any way tainted by the fact that it's 250 games playing for Edmonton.

Certainly, that was the talking point which was put out there by some league insiders this week, because within hours of each other, both ESPN's Pierre LeBrun and TSN's Darren Dreger were prognosticating that Schultz was “a better player than he's shown in Edmonton,” and “there's a better hockey player there.” Both mused that this is a problem of confidence, more or less, and that someone out there might be willing to take him on at a low price point as a sort of fixer-upper.

This is the kind of idea that will generally earn you a lot of scoffs. Let's put it this way, if an analytically inclined person (let's say: me) floated the idea that Schultz would do well in a different setting because of how he was used in Edmonton, the reaction would probably be something to the effect of, “You don't know anything, nerd.”

I have, however, privately told people that this is, in fact, my belief as well.

Don't get me wrong: There is no conventional way to argue that Schultz has been anything but not-very-good in Edmonton. For the bulk of his career, he's been used in favorable situations pretty consistently but there was a while there early on when he was effectively being used as a No. 2 defenseman, which is, shall we say, inadvisable. And that, I think, poisoned the well against Schultz a little bit. People saw him get run over in both the lockout-shortened season and 2013-14, to the tune of a 41.7 percent score-adjusted CF (dismal beyond words!) and saw him create a possession drag on just about everyone he played with, and they rightly said, “Dude is not good.” It was the only reasonable conclusion to draw at that time.

Now, using WOWYs can be a little bit dangerous without proper context, because it can lend itself to some misleading conclusions, but here I think it's important to highlight just how much of a drag on his teammates Schultz was in his first two seasons. Yes, he was playing more or less top competition and not getting particularly favorable deployment (this is always a bad idea for second-year pros!) but he was getting 100 percent caved in.

There was zero “holding his own.”

When you use the WOWY tool on the new stats site Corsica, which allows you to adjust not only for score situations, but also the buildings in which the game was played (taking out the home/road disparity you often see in performance), and the parts of the ice in which he was starting his shifts (to control for players who get a ton of offensive zone starts) you can see that he was an anchor for his 10 most common teammates to a stunning extent:

But I would argue the issue is one of a very, very bad first impression. The last two seasons, his coaches have reined in his usage and given him a little bit more favorable situations in which to work, using him mainly as a No. 3 defender against middle-of-the-lineup opponents, and things have generally gone well for him and his teammates as a result.

Using the same adjustments, but looking at the last two seasons, you can see that the results become undeniably mixed. This of course comes with the caveat that if he's getting minutes with Taylor Hall, it's more likely that Hall has ended up on the ice against middling competition, which he should and clearly does push around pretty effectively.

Nonetheless, there are only a few players on which he remains any sort of drag, and these are generally guys like Draisaitl and Yakupov who probably do better when they play further down the lineup anyway. The point, though, is that if you get him away from top competition, he can hold his own pretty effectively.

It is therefore reasonable to assume that the fact he is on a still-not-good possession team (Edmonton entered Thursday's games at a score-adjusted 47.9 percent, 22nd in the league) but continues to post positive relative possession numbers would not be out of his depth on teams that can actually keep the puck at a reasonable rate.

You're not going to believe this, but over the last two years, his relative possession numbers are second on the team (plus-2.55), behind only Oscar Klefbom, who is pretty damn good, and not just for his age.

On the whole he's likely still a negative player because the Oilers just aren't that good at doing most of the “process” things right. With that having been said, however, the rate at which he gives up those possession, shots, high-quality chances, and goals, has slowed down (sometimes considerably) in the last two seasons as his coaches figured out how to use him more effectively. That's a trend that should be expected to continue as long as he's not given too much of a rope in which to get all tangled.

This isn't to say that Schultz is any sort of dormant super-defenseman diamond-in-the-rough type, who just needs a change of scenery to unlock his true potential. But the idea that he's just a trash player who keeps getting contracts he doesn't deserve because of a perceived potential is flat-out false (okay, actually, the thing about the contracts is true). If he moves to a positive possession team like Pittsburgh or Detroit, just for example, and they use him in much the same way the Bruins use Torey Krug — as a middle-pairing power-play specialist — I think there are going to be some pretty positive results there.

Because he's been pretty good the last two seasons, I don't buy that this is a confidence issue per se. All parties involved might feel his welcome is a bit too worn-out in Edmonton, though. So if you're looking for a cheap offense-first defenseman who isn't going to get you crushed in your own end, yeah, this is a guy who probably provides you some value.

And if he can be had for, say, a middle-round pick, I'd say that's a judicious deal. You wouldn't know it by his reputation, Schultz can play at this level. His next team will just have to be smarter about managing both his minutes and the expectations around him.

Given the way he was first treated in Edmonton, the latter shouldn't be too hard.

Ryan Lambert is a Puck Daddy columnist. His email is here and his Twitter is here.

All stats via War on Ice unless otherwise stated.

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