Why Braden Schneider took a leap in year 3
It's the environment stupid-Hockey James Carville
When the New York Rangers organization drafted a letter to its fan base stating the team’s intention of rebuilding during the winter of 2018, it was a rare moment of candor. For a franchise that prided itself on being a contender every single season of Henrik Lundqvist’s career, this was a tacit admission of guilt that the continued mortgaging of future assets had left the roster without solutions.
The Rangers conducted a multi-deadline sell-off over two offseasons that stripped the roster down to the foundation. Mention any of defensemen Neal Pionk, Ryan Sproul or God forbid Rob O’Gara around any fan and their eyes go wide and suddenly they hear the sound of helicopters overhead. Rebuilding teams feature less talented players with the intent of making it more difficult to win games.
In other words: tanking.
One of the fundamental issues of the Lundqvist era of Rangers’ hockey (2005-2019) was poor talent evaluation, especially on the backend. In the quintessential chicken-or-the-egg conversation, New York overvalued its own defenseman because they played in front of the best goalie of his era and weren’t able to properly distill out the impact of individual players because of Lundqvist’s greatness.
To this day, if you watch the talking head hockey shows or consume mainstream hockey content, the measure of a good defense is “goals against,” which in theory should reflect a strong team defense. The issue with this mindset is it treats all goals equally and does not adequately portray a goaltender’s impact on goals against as a team statistic.
In addition to over-valuing their own defenseman, the Rangers during this time period were guilty of clinging to a certain idea of what a blue liner needed to look like –that there was one way to play defense: ringing the puck off the boards out of the zone, blocking shots, winning board battles and clearing the crease. Skating ability and offensive inclinationwere just added bonuses instead of essential components.
Hell, the most infamous of these decisions was then-eneral manager, Glen Sather, selecting the 6’5, 230-pound Dylan McIlrath 10th overall in the 2010 draft over Cam Fowler or Vladimir Tarasenko. In Sather’s mind, the missing piece of the Lundqvist Rangers was their own iteration of Jeff Buekeboom, a physically imposing force that played defense with size and strength.
McIlrath played 38 games as a Ranger over four seasons and was traded to the Florida Panthers for a 7th round pick in the fall of 2016.
In the wake of the 2018 letter, the Rangers embarked on a talent acquisition period trying to build up the bones of a long-term sustainable contender. From 2018 through 2021, the Rangers made 35 draft selections: 20 forwards, 11 defensemen and 4 goalies. Of those 35 choices, 12 have played at least one NHL game and 7 are currently on the Rangers active roster.
One of those seven is third-year defenseman Braden Schneider, the 19th overall pick of the 2020 draft. Many will remember the Rangers had to trade up to that spot to leapfrog the New Jersey Devils who were reportedly also interested in taking Schneider. The live feed of the Rangers’ draft room featured then-team president John Davidson fist-pumping and reminding others in the room to keep their voices down because general manager Jeff Gorton was still on the phone.
At that moment, I had reservations about the selection because the montage of Schneider highlights on NHL Network was littered with massive hits. The Saskatchewan native looked bigger and faster than everyone else in the highlight reel. In addition, the Rangers’ recent franchise history with Libor Hajek, who also played junior hockey in the Western Hockey League, set off massive alarm bells.
This felt like the Gorton regime’s McIlrath moment: a physical defenseman trying to keep up with today’s NHL to complement the already in house K’Andre Miller, Adam Fox, Ryan Lindgren, Jacob Trouba, Tony DeAngelo and Nils Lundvkist. Part of the Rangers’ compiling of blue liners was rooted in simple probability. The more capital committed to the back end, eventually they’d find a mix of six that could sustain a contender for an extended period of time.
My largest apprehension, and this was rooted in recent franchise history, was that he was from Western Canada. Being that he was also a right-handed defenseman, this put him in direct competition with the aforementioned Lundkvist for a spot on the NHL roster in the not-so-distant future. The Rangers’ track record, especially under Gorton, when it came to handling non-North American born players was not exactly great.
That hesitation about the Schneider/Lundkvist dichotomy ultimately proved correct. Schneider played two games in the AHL and then returned to a truncated WHL season in 2021 before reporting back to the Wolf Pack in the fall of 2021. At the same time, Lundkvist played one last professional season in the Swedish Elite League before reporting to the Rangers in the fall of 2021.
Lundkvist was given 25 NHL games playing with Patrik Nemeth –who was such a massive miss as a Ranger that Chris Drury had to pay two second round picks to make his contract go away –before being shuttled down to the AHL. Schneider bided his time in the AHL waiting for an opportunity, and once he got called up during that 2021-2022 season, hasn’t returned since. You may be wondering why I’ve spent this long unpacking the context of Schneider’s development, but it was the root of why I was skeptical he’d ever be a quality NHL player.
Schneider was given every opportunity to figure out his problems at the NHL level whereas Lundkvist was excommunicated to the AHL before eventually being traded to the Dallas Stars. That screamed “pet project,” and unfair advantage. After the 2022 playoffs where Schneider played all 20 playoff games in extremely sheltered minutes (11:09 average time on ice), I wrote:
I imagine Schneider’s game will improve with time. While his playoff performance was bad, let’s be frank, there were flashes of an eventual top-four defenseman. Turning those flashes into a beam of light is the goal and might determine just how high the team’s ceiling is going forward.
But when Schneider didn’t show a discernible improvement in his play with the puck in year two and the Rangers as an organization started to bill him as “mini-Trouba,” my skepticism of his development only grew. After all, Trouba was arguably the worst defenseman on the team and his reputation greatly exceeds his play.
Yet 69 games into the 2023-2024 season, with the playoffs on the horizon, I’m prepared to say Schneider’s improved considerably, and has a strong chance of continuing to trend upward if he plays well in a larger role during Trouba’s injury recovery.
Usage and deployment
In each of Schneider’s three NHL seasons, he’s been stapled to the team’s third defensive pair and played a role on the penalty kill. The Rangers did Schneider no favors in terms of a partner and I think that’s a large part of why I was so bearish on his development. Except for the true greats, very few defenseman hit the ground running at the NHL level and look smooth. In Schneider’s case, riding with Patrik Nemeth, Justin Braun, Ben Harpur or Nikko Mikkola wasn’t going to give him a ton of opportunity to be successful.
This proved especially challenging under the expectations of former head coach Gerard Gallant. In Gallant’s system, the main idea was to encourage the opponent to take low quality shots from the perimeter of the offensive zone, block or intercept the puck and spring forward, jumping the zone quickly trying to get to offense. With all of Schneider’s partners through his first two NHL seasons, none were particularly adept at recovering the puck and seamlessly transitioning to offense. This put considerably more pressure on Schneider, who was trying to find his feel for the NHL level.
It’s conventional hockey wisdom that defensemen develop slower because of the innate requirements of the position. So much of the hockey game state is free-flowing and a matter of reaction. Only with thousands of repetitions can a defenseman sharpen their instincts and gain the perspective to know where they need to be to stop a given play. That’s why the best blue liners in today’s game are already in a position to prevent offense from developing in the first place. They don’t have to react because they’ve actively prevented a scoring chance against.
In Schneider’s three NHL seasons, he’s often been deployed against other team’s middle six. According to Puck IQ’s quality of competition database, Schneider played 23.9 percent of his ice time against elite competition as a rookie, 23.4 percent in year two and 25.8 percent this season. That’s what makes the few weeks of Trouba’s injury recovery period such a golden opportunity. This will easily be the most time on ice and best competition Schneider has played against in his NHL career. If he manages to play well in a larger role, that bodes well for both his and the Rangers’ future.
Transition play
The single biggest red flag in Schneider’s play through two seasons was with the puck on his stick. Possession is key in today’s skill-based game and even if the puck doesn’t immediately end up in the back of your own net, continuously being forced to defend as opposed to getting to offense in the long run is a bad environment for success. Transitioning from offense to defense is an essential component of the modern NHL defenseman’s game, and for the first two seasons, Schneider showed no ability to handle the puck in his own zone. It was “lob the puck high out and lose possession” or “ring it along the boards and lose possession”.
Schneider isn’t exactly Adam Fox. But he’s not a total liability when he recovers the puck now.
The table above from Corey Sznajder’s All three zone’s game tracking project shows a stark improvement at the foundational level of defense. When Schneider has to put his back to the forecheck, go below his own goal line and try to get the puck out of the zone to forwards, he’s shown improvement. For much of his first two seasons, teams would dump the puck in against Schneider and ramp up the forecheck to pressure him and his partner for extended periods of time because they could not recover loose pucks. While Schneider still has the highest rate of failed exits of any Rangers’ defenseman, that improvement is encouraging.
While the table above might not scream massive improvement, and clears don’t usually result in retaining possession, averaging one and a third more per 60 minutes of ice time does translate to less defense. In today’s NHL, the best defense is not having to play defense at all.
It wouldn’t be fair to chalk Schneider’s improvement up solely to having a competent partner for the first time in his entire career with Erik Gustafsson, but I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the best play of the 2020 first round pick’s career is coming from a known driver of offense. For all of Gustafsson’s shortcomings in his own end, his impact on offense was never really up for debate. Schneider having the defined role of puck retriever and a partner who’s adept at moving the puck gives him a comfort that simply wasn’t there earlier in his career.
Somewhere I’ve been critical of Schneider in the past was his neutral zone play. Much like Trouba, he liked to throw the big hit in the neutral zone. In a vacuum, forcing the puck away from the opposition by throwing a check is perfectly acceptable. The issue comes when it’s done at the expense of sound defense and becomes more about the hit itself. The whole point of checking is to win the puck, not just to throw a hit. At times, Schneider would step up, throw a massive hit, but the puck would keep moving and his partner would be left to defend an odd man rush.
The table above shows an improvement in neutral zone defense stemming from fewer controlled zone entries against. That means teams are opting to dump the puck in behind Schneider and trying to win the foot race and subsequent puck battle rather than engage him at his own blue line. In addition, he’s increased the rate of zone entry denials from years past, which means he’s preventing offense from developing in the first place.
The gradual decrease in carry % means teams are not trying to get past Schneider and either going after his partner or just dumping the puck in. The more-than-doubling of the rate he denies the other team entry of the offensive zone supports the premise that Schneider is playing less defense than in past seasons and enabling the Rangers’ as a collective to drive possession better.
The NHL’s EDGE database supports this based on time in the offensive zone.
Playing less defense is helping Schneider’s game and allowing him to foster a more favorable game situation when on the ice. The next step in Schneider’s development is actively suppressing the other team’s offense, not just trading chances in both directions.
Chance creation
No one is expecting Schneider to ever put up gaudy point totals. That’s not his game – he doesn’t get power play time. There are multiple players above him in the pecking order for power play time and he’s playing the least average time on ice of the main six defenseman this season. So, a lot of his offensive metrics should be viewed through the lens of game control.
While expected goals and scoring chances do not tell the entire story of a player, they do describe the game situation when said player is on the ice. It’s safe to assume that if the other team is creating more scoring opportunities than the other, they are likely to score sooner. It’s not a guarantee of course, but it’s more likely than not.
When looking at Schneider’s first two seasons as an NHL regular, it is worth pointing out that woes at 5-on-5 were not unique to him. At large, under Gallant, the Rangers were comfortable with conceding chances in trying to counterattack on offense. The team was consistently out-chanced and out expected goals at even strength in part by design. The emphasis was to lean on goaltender Igor Shesterkin and use the team’s high-skill talent (Zibanejad, Panarin, Kreider, Trocheck) to swing the game on a handful of plays.
CF: Scoring chance (goals, shots on goal, missed shots, blocked shots)
CA: Chance against (goals, shots on goal, missed shots, blocked shots)
You’ll notice that the Rangers are generating significantly more offense when Schneider is on the ice than the last two years. It’s also worth pointing out that this is by far the most favorable forward deployment he’s had as a professional. It’d be hard for any defenseman to be successful early on in their career with subpar forward help, especially in their own end.
2023-2024: Brodzinski, Cuylle, Kakko, Panarin, Lafreniere, Trocheck, Zibanejad, Kreider
2022-2023: Kakko, Lafreniere, Vesey, Goodrow, Chytil, Blais, Gauthier
2021-2022: Goodrow, Lafreniere, Hunt, Chytil, Reaves, Rooney, Gauthier
The deepening of the Rangers’ lineup this season might be the first example of trickle down economics ever working. With more forward talent to disperse throughout the team, there is more opportunity for the team to function as a team and less as individuals trying to make plays outside of structure.
In addition to generating more scoring chances, they are also creating more valuable chances. While expected goals isn’t a perfect statistic and doesn’t account for pre-shot movement or goalie position, it does give an idea of where scoring chances are coming from on the ice and how likely they are to result in a goal. The jump in value of the scoring chances Schneider is on the ice for is a strong indicator that the Rangers are in more advantageous game situations when he’s on the ice than in year’s past.
The jump in the rate of both total scoring chances and the quality of scoring chances would indicate that the Rangers are playing at a faster pace than in years past. Meaning that when Schneider is on the ice, New York is playing a bit more of an up-and-down game, which might not always be ideal depending on the opponent, but it is a sign that his game is evolving.
The next few weeks, playing higher in the lineup will be instructive for just how far Schneider’s come. In the nine games since Trouba’s injury against the Panthers, Schneider is up almost 4 minutes per game from his season average and the Rangers are being outscored 8-7 when he’s on the ice.
Final thoughts and conclusion
A lot of my frustration and skepticism with Schneider stemmed from my preconceived notions about the Rangers’ front office. It was hard to trust the general manager’s decision-making when his first offseason was so bad and the types of players he prioritized. It was fair to assume that if Drury thought the reason the Rangers weren’t winning games was a perceived lack of toughness, and that giving Schneider every opportunity to stick when Lundkvist wasn’t afforded the same opportunity was a comment on his physical stature and not his hockey ability.
Being that a lot of the compliments about Schneider’s play stemmed from not actually playing hockey, I was weary. Whenever talking heads praise “compete” and “moxie,” that’s a polite way of saying “they don’t do a whole lot, but they’re a good guy so we have to say something nice”.
Over time I’ve warmed up to both the general manager and Schneider. I’m not sure I see a direct path for Schneider into a larger role in the organization with both Trouba and Fox ahead of him in the pecking order on the right side. The best case scenario here for New York is Schneider looking comfortable in a larger role over the next few weeks and easing concerns about what a post-Trouba defense would look like.
Not to hijack this Schneider analysis with Trouba discourse, but the two are intrinsically linked based on the organization’s perception and marketing of both players. If Schneider looks the part as well as Zac Jones has filling in on the third pair, it at the very least forces the front office to ask the question. Obviously Trouba will draw back as soon as he’s healthy – hell, there’s a good argument he will rush himself back because of who he is as a person and hockey’s insistence on sacrificing oneself for the team.
But most importantly, if Schneider succeeds, it will give head coach Peter Laviolette an increased sense of confidence in the defenseman. In an ideal world, the coach would have the liberty of rolling all three defensive pairs relatively evenly during the course of a long playoff run. It’s simply too hard to win multiple playoff series with a shortened bench. It really does take all 18 dressed skaters and the goaltender to go the distance.
Ultimately, my biggest question about Schneider is the same as it is about the defensive group as a whole: Can you move the puck well enough to not get hemmed in for 45 seconds at a time? Other than Fox, one could argue that five of the Rangers’ six defensemen lack the ability to break out of their own zone well enough on a consistent basis to sustain a long playoff run.
Teams that struggle, especially at 5-on-5, which is roughly 80 percent of the game, typically put too much responsibility on a handful of players to swing games. During both the Lundqvist era and the two years of Gallant, much of the Rangers’ fortune hinged on maybe two players and everyone else in the lineup playing the game to a push.
If the Rangers’ third pair is functional and not just asked to tread water, there’s a serious argument that this would be the deepest iteration of the team in the salary cap era. For the sake of this group, Schneider needs to be what the front office thinks he is in reality, not just their imagination.
There’s a case that Schneider’s improvement in his own end, at least from an underlying perspective, is tied to playing less overall defense and not that his defensive ability itself has vastly improved. The other team still generates more scoring chances and more valuable scoring chances on the ice, but this year, the Rangers are at least getting more offense. It could also be a case of the team as a whole being more effective and less deadweight in the bottom half of the lineup holding the group back.
So maybe Schneider wasn’t as poor as his underlyings would suggest, but he also hasn’t taken some massive step. After all, it is only Schneider’s third season at the NHL level and it’s the first time he’s played with an above-average partner for more than half a season.
Capitalizing on the opportunity of a bigger role over the next few weeks would go a long way in raising the team’s ceiling. The NHL playoffs are the highest variance of the four North American sports, so anything to improve the Rangers’ odds, even slightly, from lower in the lineup would be a welcome addition to their calculus.
The team’s fortune likely won’t hinge on Schneider alone, but him taking a step in performance and becoming a true shot suppressing defenseman would open up all types of tantalizing possibilities. There’s no doubt he’s improved this year, but now, the conversation is about his ceiling. His ceiling and the Rangers, especially in the not so distant future are inherently tied together.