Forget for a minute that the Leafs have now lost 8 consecutive games to open the 2009-10 season. Forget also that they sit firmly in 30th, and have already sacrificed their 1st round draft picks for the next 2 seasons.
Instead, let’s look to the future.
One of the main selling points behind investing so heavily in the defense this past summer (Mike Komisarek, Francois Beauchemin) was to aid in the development of Luke Schenn. Schenn projects as a Komisarek-like player; big, tough, not a lot of offensive upside.
So far, the experiment has been a massive flop.
Last season, Schenn participated in 70 games, logging 90,443 seconds of ice time. That works out to around 21 minutes and 33 seconds per game. Not bad for a rookie defenseman, but a number you would figure to climb in his 2nd season. Instead, the acquisition of veteran minute-crunchers has cut into Schenn’s ice time. He’s down to roughly 16 minutes and 12 seconds per game. A reduction of over 5 minutes per game in ice time is not the ideal development path for a young defenseman.
Worse, it’s not just Schenn’s ice time that’s taken a step backwards, so has his defensive production; at least insofar as it can be measured statistically. His blocked shots rate has fallen from 0.0013/second to 0.0010/second, derived from a 0.7/game reduction. Conversely, his penalty minutes are actually rising. Last season, Schenn earned just north of 1 minute in penalties per game (1.0143). So far this season? He’s up to 1.375 per game, despite the reduction in ice time.
It’s early in the season, and the Leafs have struggled mightily, so it’s entirely plausible that the Schenn’s changing numbers reflect more upon the team than himself. That said, it’s undeniable that the acquisition of veteran blue-liners has not yet paid dividends on the ice (the team is winless) and the most noticeable impact is the reduction in ice-time to the team’s future defensive stud.