Montreal Canadiens: Jordie Benn has been fairly fancy early on

Jordie Benn appeared to be the odd man out ahead of the season for the Montreal Canadiens but has turned the perception of himself around quickly.

Predicting the blueline for the Montreal Canadiens wasn’t too difficult of a task. Many agreed that the top-four would be made up of Victor Mete, Noah Juulsen, Jeff Petry, and Karl Alzner. The battle for the bottom pair most likely would’ve come down to Xavier Ouellet and Mike Rielly leaving Jordie Benn and David Schlemko for either a spot in the press box or on the waiver wire.

If you were along this wave of thinking, you were about 83% correct. Both Ouellet and Benn had solid camps forcing the coaching staff’s hand to get them in the starting lineup leaving Alzner to become a healthy scratch until Wednesday night’s victory over the St. Louis Blues. Rewind the clocks a couple of months in the past, and this sounds completely insane.

It’s not as if Ouellet is carrying Benn along for the ride; the beard has reverted back to the steady defender he originally was when the Montreal Canadiens traded for him.

You’d expect a player like Benn to perform well when it comes to the eye-test. He’s a physical player who uses his stick well and takes care of his gaps more often than not. Benn does tend to cough up a juicy turnover, but he’s refrained from that. But the advanced stats have placed the 31-year-old in a shiny yet surprising light.

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Marc Dumont brought this up initially in a tweet. Benn is leading all Habs players (as of October 17th) in Corsi For (CF%) at 63.64%, scoring chances for at 65.67%, and via Corsica, expected goals (xGF%) for at 69.89%. So what does this mean? Benn is getting a good deal of pucks towards the net, a good deal of them are scoring chances, and they’re being taken from decent locations at an effective rate and quality.

It gets better than that when you look at his production league-wide and again, Dumont brought this to light. Benn is (among defencemen who have played at least 30 minutes this season via Natural Stat Trick:

4th in CF%
7th in SCF%
8th in HDCF% (high-danger chances for) at 68.00%
1st in xGF%

Again, it’s not as if he’s being carried. When you look at his RelTCF%, which neutralizes the effect of his teammates by comparing CF% when on the ice vs. off the ice, Benn is still at the top of the Habs at 12.63.

Does this mean Benn should be promoted to play on the top pair against opponents’ best players? No. In fact, it means the exact opposite. Claude Julien has been using him in the right situations to have success. The majority of his starts (65.5% of them) are in the offensive zone, and he’s facing far weaker competition compared to last season via his Quality of Competition (QoC):

17-18 QoC CF% – 49.86%
18-19 QoC CF% – 47.61%

It’ll be interesting to see how long this trend continues for the bearded blueliner. Benn led all defencemen in CF% and SCF% again, and it may end up being a solid strength for the Montreal Canadiens. However, Dumont brought up a good point in one of the replies to his tweet. A defenceman can thrive if placed where he’s meant to be.

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It could easily be more than this. Benn looks more confident with the puck and is clearly benefitting from the chemistry with Ouellet and support of defence coach Luke Richardson. But Julien allowing him to thrive instead of being in over his head is another detail that’s helped the performance of the blueline improve so far this season.

Acknowledgements: Advanced stats from Natural Stat Trick and Corsica.

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