Couple things to unpack here:
1) General reminder that analytics are not the be all and end all (why does this have to said each time lol)
2) The eye test from judging defenseman is more broken than analytics is
I will keep rehashing this, because noone is aware how broken the evaluation method for defenseman is. And people continue to still over rely on it. Ive made several posts on this matter, so what is another one. Fans are subject to all of the usual human evaluation biases, and its really bad for judging D. Basically humans will overemphasize a very small sample of occurrences and overlook/ignore/not be aware of a much larger small size of less significant events, but in total add up to much more importance than the small sample size of occurrences they overvalue. Basically, they put 80% of weight in an evaluation into 30% of whats actually going on
What an actual example of this? Fans over value goals against and the odd noticeable mistake way, way, way, way (times about 10) too much. If a D gets burned wide, or passes the puck up the middle and it gets picked off once- fans will ride that player to no end and pretty much all fans will leave the game with the conclusion that D sucked. It doesnt matter if that D made 20 other good break out passes, or held the line, kept the puck in and resulted in a goal for us. D are taught from a young age to not take risks and to just play it simple. Simple D get played, risky D get ridden (even though risky plays result in good plays for your team). This is why D like risky Nurse (who I made a similar post about last year), Gardiner, Barrie etc will continue to be criminally underrated. They are prone to the odd big mistake and fans will judge them entirely on that mistake. They will make dozens of other great plays that are way more impactful to the game and these will get ignored. No fan remembers a good outlet pass in the 2nd period of a game 3 days ago. But they do remember that one give away that resulted in a goal against
Fans love simple D. They love a D who doesnt get burned or make glaring mistakes. And they dont care that the D offers nothing of value elsewhere. Its complete loss aversion mentality. Fans/coaches would rather forego 2 goals on offense in order to prevent one goal against on defense
Fans (myself included), GMs, coaches suck at evaluating D, we are all subject to the same biases that plague humans in real life. This is way historically the D cores have been filled low skill, rugged and simple D. The Grybas and Fistrics of the world have played 350+ games in the NHL because they play a low event, simple game. High event D are only in the NHL if they can play in the top 4. This is because coaches cant stand high event D (even if they would be better overall than a guy like Gryba)
I would compare Klefbom to Gardiner. Gardiner got crapped on by Leaf fans for a long time and it was perplexing to me. Gardiner offered a crap ton to the leafs and was one of their best D.
3) Tied into #2, fans are so swayed by PDO, and Klefboms was around 96 this year. Whenever a player is getting a ton of hype one year, you can bet the farm their PDO is over 100, and when they are getting crapped on, you can bet the PDO is under 97. Its the same every year, over and over again
For the record, I did not think Klefbom had a good year and stats were flattering to him. This is just my observations on D with similar play styles to him
