There is no one without another, positional game doesnt matter at all if you suck blocking passing lanes ect. Then youre just a pylon. I think it was reasonable answer for him, considering some one just said stick skills are meaningless in hockey defence, it is exactly the opposite.
I didn’t say stick skills or blocking passes are useless in defending. They are used in fact much more in the way that does not lead into takeaways, but still made into preventing a goal being scored. Just think about it, how many takeaways do the best takeaway specialists get per game? Then think of how many times opponents are really attacking and trying to get goals or goal chances per game? Takeaways are about once per game for very good players in them, but preventing goals and scoring chances with good defensive plays and positional play happen by good defensive players several times per game. So it is much, much more important to just prevent goals than to get exact takeaways. Thus takeaways are a way overrated stat, if you want to really understand who are good defensive players. Takeaways are really a very small part of really good defensive playing.
McDavid was the best in the league in takeaways with 111, but that even lead to only a bit over one takeaway per game. Which has after all a ridiculously small meaning defensively, when you think of the whole season. The second best in takeaways was Jeff Skinner with 93 takeaways for this season, but unfortunately he was in general an abysmal player defensively. Dude is an absolute horrible tirefire defensively (one of the worst in the league), so takeaways mean absolutely nothing to his defence. Takeaways by themselves really don’t tell much at all about how a player is defensively, trust me.
