Montreal Canadiens: Jeff Petry deserves credit for his season so far
By Omar L
There is a lot of buzz around the league’s top defencemen, and their numbers and Jeff Petry is part of it given his production with the Montreal Canadiens.
When it comes to defencemen in the NHL, the focus has been on Morgan Rielly of the Toronto Maple Leafs and Thomas Chabot of the Ottawa Senators. No surprise there given their rank in scoring amongst other defenders sitting first and second respectively. What may be surprising, depending on how closely you follow these things, is that the Montreal Canadiens have a player in the top ten via Jeff Petry.
The 31-year-old has been one of the team’s most important pieces for the calendar year. Petry’s responsibilities and minutes went up after Shea Weber was shut down last season and with that came more opportunities to score. He had a career year in both goals (12) and assists (30) and overall points at 42.
That total saw Petry finish fourth in team scoring and 24th in the NHL amongst defencemen tied with Oliver Ekman-Larsson. It’s a bit different this season though.
The Montreal Canadiens started things off with Weber still on the sidelines while Petry was the team’s top defender. Petry put up 2 goals and 15 assists in that 24-game span and has since added another 5 goals and 5 assists. He’s now sitting on 27 points so far this year placing him tenth in defensive scoring behind Dustin Byfuglien and just ahead of Ryan Suter.
Not bad on the offensive side of things. Petry has a knack of defensive mishaps in his own end or the neutral zone, but for the most part, he’s pretty sound. You can get that from the eye-test, but the fancy stats tell the same story. In particular, his relative Corsi against per hour (RelCA/60).
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RelCA/60 is a good way to get a numerical representation of a player’s individual shot suppression. The more negative the value is, the more successful the player is at preventing shot attempts towards their net. Petry currently has a -0.65 at 5v5 which is not bad whatsoever.
Defencemen like Petry are fairly valuable in the NHL. He’s a second pairing player who can slide in and take over as the number one in case of injury. That’s an underrated asset and Petry’s year so fair is being overlooked.
He’s at 0.73 points-per-game and could add another 33 if he continues to score at this pace. Petry may not be in the Norris conversation, but he does deserve to be talked about more often than he already is.
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