Jordie Benn: A Year in Review

Throughout the offseason, Blackout Dallas will be doing season reviews on individual players and how their season played out.  First up was Art Ross winner Jamie Benn and the incredible season he had.  Now it is time to take a look at his older brother Jordie Benn.

The Costly Errors

Jordie Benn wasn’t the worst defender on the Stars this season but almost every game came and went with fans wanting him scratched.  Why? For the most part, his mistakes were obvious to even the casual fan and they seemed to always have led to a goal against.  No Stars defensemen had a worse goals against/goals for ratio than Jordie Benn.  Only five players were on the ice for more goals against than Jordie which isn’t good considering his ice-time relative to the other players.  Only Alex Goligoski, Jason Spezza, and John Klingberg had more even-strength giveaways than Jordie.  Those players are playmakers and puck-movers and their style generally lends itself to having more giveaways.  Just to put things into perspective a little, P.K. Subban, John Tavares and Brent Burns led the league this season in giveaways.  In Jordie’s case, you can’t really make the playmaking excuse as that is not what he is there for.  Much of his struggles stemmed out of making the wrong play at the wrong time and he has to fix that moving forward.

It Wasn’t All Bad

Just like the team as a whole, even though there were struggles there were many positives to take out of this season as well.  Of Stars playing at least 300 minutes this season, Jordie was 5th on the team in even-strength corsi-for %.  He starts play in the defensive zone more often than the offensive zone, as only John Klingberg and Jason Demers had a lower offensive zone start % for defensemen.  His overall play really steadied when the Stars added Jason Demers.  Demers and Benn played a good majority of the season as a pair and they were an incredibly effective one for Lindy Ruff.  For starters, it allowed Jordie to play on the left-side which is significant.  Also, the way Ruff used Jordie changed after the beginning of the season.

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It is no question that the Stars struggled out of the gate this season.  Jordie’s worst times this year were also at the beginning and maybe it is because too much was expected of him.  Realistically, Jordie Benn is a solid bottom-pairing defenseman who can be trusted to hold his own for 15-18 minutes of ice time.  That was pretty much the range of ice time he stayed in from December to the season finale, and that is when we saw the best out of Jordie Benn.  Early in the season, he was playing 21-24 minutes a night which is just too high for him to be as effective.  That isn’t to say he is a bad player, it is just not an effective role for him to be in.

Next: Jamie Benn: A Year in Review

Something that has to be remembered is that the sport of hockey can be very random.  Luck certainly plays into the game at times and perhaps nobody on the team had worse luck this season than Jordie Benn.  PDO is a statistic which adds together on-ice shooting % and on-ice save %.  It generally trends towards 100, so players above or below that line is somewhat attributed to good or bad luck.  Jordie Benn had the lowest PDO of any Stars defenseman this season at 97.66.  Jordie had several plays this season where the puck bounced off of him and into the net.  Although he struggled early, his play evened out as the season went on.  His luck didn’t seem to change however, and that can usually vary from season to season.

Final Thoughts on Jordie Benn

I think of Jordie Benn this season in the same light of some of the past seasons for Alex Goligoski.  A solid defenseman who plays well when he is used in the correct role and is prone to the obvious mistake.  Jordie was a better defenseman than Trevor Daley this season but because Benn’s mistakes were so obvious, it made him look a lot worse than he really is.  If Jordie is deployed as a traditional bottom-pairing defenseman, I think he will excel next season.  If he is used beyond that role, he may struggle as he did this year.  Jordie will be entering the final year of his deal and certainly has a lot to prove.