Puck Lists: 7 reasons Brent Burns should be the Norris frontrunner
I know it’s only December and teams have only played about 25 games so far this season.
I know that.
But 25 games is a decent number and everything, and it at least gives you some sort of idea of what the benchmark for success is. Will Patrik Laine keep up his molten goalscoring pace? I don’t know, but someone has to surpass the baseline he set, won’t they? And hey, it’s starting to look like Connor McDavid has edged into “best player alive” territory. Look at the point total alone. Tough to disagree there, and if someone wants to make a counterargument, well, that’s the guy to see about it.
Anyway, I say all this because Brent Burns has been the best defenseman in the league this year and I don’t think it’s especially close. Travis Yost did a fairly advanced take on this the other day, but not so advanced you’re going to be bogged down in it.
For my part of the argument, I’m going to dumb it down a little bit and just give you seven simple reasons Burns should be the Norris favorite right now.
7. He’s a Good Canadian Boy
Do not for a second think this kind of thing doesn’t matter. If Erik Karlsson were from Simcoe instead of Sweden, he probably waltzes to another well-deserved Norris season. Know where the nice big boy Brent Burns is from? Barrie. In Ontario. In Canada. That’s going to matter to some people. Probably. Definitely.
6. Points
Karlsson recently took over the league lead in blue line scoring, as he is wont to do, and following Wednesday night’s games was up to 27 in 27 games on the season. The man he passed? Burns, who now has 23 with one fewer game played than Karlsson.
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It’s hard to say that anyone will be able to keep pace with Karlsson in a scoring race, let alone surpass him once again, but if anyone seems likely to do it, it’s Burns, who scored 158 points in 190 games since the start of 14-15. Which is a lot.
And hey, remember when people used to complain about how the Norris only ever went to a defenseman with a ton of points from a good team? Hey, Brent Burns has a ton of points! And also…
5. His team is good (or at least in a bad enough division to appear that way)
There were perhaps one or two reasons to be skeptical that San Jose could have taken a bit of a step back this summer, but so far they haven’t really shown any signs of slowing down. I think some of that has to do with how rotten the entire Pacific is apart from the Sharks and Kings. Maybe you include Edmonton here, and I wouldn’t begrudge it just because McDavid is that level of a difference-maker. But nonetheless, it’s tough to see any of those teams improving appreciably.
As such, the Sharks should continue to rack up points at a pretty respectable clip. Tough to see them falling out of a top-three spot this season. And honestly, if the Sens make the playoffs last season, Karlsson probably wins too. Let’s put it this way: His team being awful enough when he was off the ice that they missed the playoffs despite his heroic season certainly didn’t help his candidacy. “Should of killed penalties,” and so on.
Burns does that and the Sharks are better for it. But even when he’s off the ice, they’re still really good, and it’ll only fuel his candidacy. Even if it shouldn’t.
4. Shot volume
This is a crazy one.
Alex Ovechkin has led the NHL in shot volume every single season since he came into the league. He’s always north of 360 or so — about four a game — when the owners don’t lock out the players. Burns is on a similar pace right now. From the blue line.
And in fact, as of this writing he’s actually ahead of Ovechkin in shots by 12. It’s actually Jake Voracek (100) who’s in second place right now.
If Burns can keep anything resembling this shooting pace up for the remainder of the season, that would be incredible. He put up 353 last season which is the seventh-largest number by a defenseman since the ’60s. The only guys ahead of him? Bobby Orr (four times!) and Ray Bourque (twice). If he hits 400, which he almost certainly won’t, he’d still be 13 behind Orr’s age-21 season, in which he averaged more than 5.4 shots per game. Burns would have to increase his output by 25 percent.
But still, he looks likely to once again land in Bourque/Orr territory, which, if you’re a defenseman, is where you want to be.
(Also this shot volume is a pretty good reason to believe he’s going to keep that aforementioned impressive production rolling along happily.)
3. Advanced stats
See the Yost article linked above for a nice look at the argument for Burns here, but just a quick one for you: Only 12 defensemen produce more expected goals per 60 minutes than Burns’s 3.17. And yeah, he has one of the highest expected goals against per 60 in the league as well, but almost everyone ahead of him in this regard is in negative territory, meaning that it’s really hard to keep up a positive goal differential when playing that much offensively active hockey.
Burns does it. Despite the fact that he’s so good in attack, he’s still in the top 10 percent of all defensemen in the league, even barely used ones, in terms of expected goal differential per 60. He’s awesome. Wow.
2. TOI
Burns plays more than 24 minutes a night, which is a lot. It’s 17th in the league, in fact. Pretty heavy load to shoulder.
But here’s something counterintuitive: He only plays about 3:15 a night on the power play, where someone like Shayne Gostisbehere, Oliver Ekman-Larsson, or yes even Drew Doughty get a larger share of their TOI.
Instead, he’s spending a bigger bulk of his minutes at 5-on-5 (he also doesn’t spend a ton of time on the PK). The reason I bring all this up is that it’s really hard to score at 5-on-5, but Burns is doing it anyway, even in somewhat limited — but not a small number of — minutes.
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Last season your old pal Brent Burns played close to 26 minutes a night. That’s dropped off this year, but the shot volume and offense have not. He’s magical.
1. No one is “due” no matter what anyone tells you, and believe me they’re going to tell you all about it starting very soon
Last season Erik Karlsson had the best season by any defenseman in recent memory but didn’t win the award because certain very incorrect members of the PHWA decided that Drew Doughty, who’s like 15 years old I’m pretty sure, was “due” a Norris for, I don’t know, his service to the sport over less than a decade.
It was a joke of an award decision in a year that didn’t exactly show the league’s writers in the best of light. And it might just happen again this year.
I don’t really expect Shea Weber to keep up his white-hot start because he’s not this good, and indeed he’s already starting to fade a little bit. But oh my god given how well the Drew Doughty Deserves It Because He Was So Good For Six Years In A Row campaign went, you know the Shea Weber Deserves It Because We Think He Was Good For Like A Decade Even Though It’s Really Starting To Seem Like Ryan Suter Was Carrying All That Water And I’m Just Ignoring That Fact campaign is gonna roll out of the station soon.
Brent Burns (and Erik Karlsson) ((and the guy Shea Weber got traded for whose name I forget)) (((and hell even Drew Doughty))) are all better than him. Have a good one folks.
Ryan Lambert is a Puck Daddy columnist. His email is here and his Twitter
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