hockeyguy1967
Trans hockey fan! Go Leafs and Oilers!
- Aug 24, 2017
- 2,290
- 1,159
No, most people watch him play. He is horrible in the Defensive zone and always has been. Both his advanced stats and normal stats say so. He is a team worst defense man that is a -7 on a team with a +26 goal differential. That is pretty bad based on his production and average 22:23 minutes of time.I think people just look at Barrie's size and assume he's worse defensively than he actually is. His issues are really overblown. He's a very smart player with a good stick and he holds his own against much bigger players fairly often. He's never going to outmuscle the biggest players in the league but he's good at planting and not giving the puck up; I think he gets in trouble the most when he's actively avoiding contact and panicking with the puck to get out of the way of it.
There's definitely a mental aspect to that; when you're told a billion times that you're too small to play defense (and it sounds like that was his main takeaway from his arbitration hearing), you start to internalize it. He kind of has the opposite problem of Letang, who I think plays like he thinks he's 6'5" and it gets him in trouble. Barrie does much better when he doesn't overthink stuff and just lets his natural smarts and abilities take over.
His Fenwick and Corsi have always been pretty low and this year he has a staggering 62% Ozone start.
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