There’s a moment in the 2022 Netflix documentary “Trainwreck” — which tells the story of the ill-fated music festival Woodstock ’99 — when Fred Durst, lead singer of the rowdy nu-metal band Limp Bizkit, is blamed by Woodstock’s promoters for what happened during and in the wake of their set during the weekend’s second night.
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It’s likely true that Durst’s antics did rile people up, leading to the destruction of a sound tower in the middle of the crowd. But one of the stage security officers from two decades ago responded with a salient, convincing counterargument to their assignment of blame.
“I don’t think you can blame Limp Bizkit for being Limp Bizkit,” he said. “It’s like blaming a bear for being a bear. Limp Bizkit is what it is.”
Basically, the festival promoters could have predicted what effect the band might have on an already-raucous crowd. They got exactly the chaos they should have expected had they done their homework on the band’s very nature.
Which brings us to Flyers defenseman Tony DeAngelo.
Coming out of the All-Star break, DeAngelo’s days in Philadelphia’s top four on defense came to an end. The dream of a first pair featuring DeAngelo and Ivan Provorov ended months ago, but coaches still clung to the possibility of DeAngelo clicking with Travis Sanheim. No more. Rasmus Ristolainen jumped up with Sanheim on the second pair, and DeAngelo skated with Nick Seeler in bottom-pair duties on Monday and Thursday.
Why? DeAngelo’s defensive weaknesses.
“He’s a really good offensive player,” John Tortorella said. “It is our job as a coaching staff to try to help him become better defensively. We need him to become better defensively, without hampering one of the biggest strengths he has for us: getting us out of our end zone, just some plays that people wouldn’t even try that he succeeds out there.”
Tortorella isn’t kidding that DeAngelo needs to be better defensively. Out of all NHL defensemen with at least 200 minutes played at even strength this season, DeAngelo ranks third-worst in the league in terms of impact on his team’s ability to prevent expected goals, ahead of only John Klingberg and Ian Mitchell. Only six blueliners have been on the ice for more high-danger chances against per 60 minutes. By all public statistical models and measures, DeAngelo has been one of the worst defensemen in the NHL this season.
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So pushing him down to the third pair makes perfect sense. Tortorella’s lineup decision isn’t the problem here.
The problem is it shouldn’t come as a surprise that DeAngelo isn’t good at defense. Yet apparently, it did.
“We know what Tony is. I’m a little bit — not disappointed — but the defensive liability is something we need to work at,” Tortorella said Thursday. “I didn’t think the amount of work that we need to do with him … I didn’t think that at the point in time that we got him. But it is what it is.”
Tortorella’s surprise makes sense when read in tandem with general manager Chuck Fletcher’s comments regarding DeAngelo on the day the Flyers traded for him.
“The defensive side, we believe Tony’s improved that part of the game,” Fletcher said.
But that was always a fantasy, at least per Evolving-Hockey’s RAPM model, which isolates a player’s impact on his team’s chance creation (offense) and chance suppression (defense). The model showcases two things: DeAngelo has always graded out among the league’s worst blueliners at defense, and there were no measurable signs of improvement heading into 2022-23.
So why did they think that he had? What did they miss that the RAPM model — which does its best to account for all outside factors that contribute to a player’s success or failure, such as competition and teammate quality — was able to catch?
Tortorella all but confirmed the answer to that, too.
“Last team he played for — Carolina — I think they could absorb some of that with their roster as far as maybe some of his deficiencies defensively. It kind of sticks out more with us,” he said.
Carolina has long been one of the league’s best puck possession teams. This season, the Hurricanes have been the best even strength defensive team in the NHL, holding opponents to 2.12 expected goals per 60 minutes. Of course, they would be able to provide more defensive support to DeAngelo than a club basically relearning how to play defense the right (read: the Torts) way after the debacle that was 2021-22.
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And there’s another reason: Jaccob Slavin.
In Carolina, DeAngelo thrived on the top pair with Slavin, posting a 60.33 percent expected goal share and helping the Hurricanes to a 42-21 advantage in goals. His success in that role was a key trade justification Fletcher cited in July, especially given the likely continued absence of Ryan Ellis from the Flyers’ lineup.
“I mean, you look at Tony, he played with Slavin last year, a lot of the year,” Fletcher said. “He’s a guy that has played 19-20 minutes on a fairly regular basis.”
But Fletcher took the wrong lesson. His takeaway was that DeAngelo was fully capable of taking on top-four minutes, if not top-pair minutes, like he did in Carolina. His takeaway should have been that Slavin is a really, really good defenseman who carried DeAngelo, particularly in his own zone.
The numbers back that up. Last season, Slavin ranked in the 95th percentile in xG defensive impact among blueliners; this season, he’s in the 94th percentile. Carolina has the quintessential modern-day shutdown defenseman.
The Flyers don’t.
Carolina understood this. After a year of watching DeAngelo closer than anyone, the Hurricanes deemed his value to be that of a sub-$4 million defenseman, but were willing to slightly exceed $4 million because their coaches liked him so much. They determined he wasn’t worth his $5 million AAV contract demand, though, so they let the pending restricted free agent check if any other clubs felt he was worth that price. The Flyers obliged.
Shockingly, the front office that constructed a team with the NHL’s third-best record was right, and the one that built the fourth-worst was wrong.
Carolina believed — absent a partner of Slavin’s quality — he was best served as a bottom-half-of-the-lineup blueliner at even strength who could provide serious power play utility. Fletcher and the Flyers, on the other hand, completely misunderstood his value, with Tortorella’s comments this week serving as evidence of their summer delusion.
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Sure, they knew DeAngelo wasn’t a defensive stud. Fletcher at least acknowledged that in July.
“We’re not expecting him to come in and be an elite defender. We wanted to get him so we don’t have to defend as much,” he said.
But even that comment deserves further examination. Yes, teams create lots of offense with DeAngelo on the ice. They also give up a ton, too. Since 2019-20, he ranks first in the NHL among defensemen (with at least 2,000 minutes played at five-on-five) in combined on-ice expected goals per 60 minutes — adding together the xG created by his team with the player on the ice, and xG created by the other team as well. He’s right near the top in combined actual goals/60 (10th) and even combined shot attempts (fifth) as well. DeAngelo has long been the definition of a high-event player; not one who helps his team to spend 60 percent of the time in the attacking half of the ice but is prone to the occasional defensive lapse during the other 40 percent.
There are two ways a team can survive and even thrive with DeAngelo on the ice at five-on-five given his style of play and strengths/weaknesses. Option A is to put him with Slavin, or a player of his caliber and style. (Provorov isn’t Slavin.) Option B is to use him in his current role, as a sheltered third pair defenseman getting top PP minutes. The problem? That guy isn’t worth $5 million per year, and certainly isn’t a viable first choice answer to the “how do we replace Ryan Ellis?” question.
And it’s not like that was impossible to predict in July when DeAngelo was acquired. From our breakdown of the trade in its immediate aftermath:
“DeAngelo is probably best served as a sheltered No. 4/5 defenseman on an NHL depth chart who can thrive on the power play. That’s more or less how Carolina viewed him during contract negotiations, pegging him more as a mid-$3 million cap hit player. Instead, the Flyers are likely to give him around $5 million per year, which either makes him an overpaid third-pair defenseman, or an Ellis replacement on the top pair (assuming they keep Sanheim and Ristolainen together) with serious defensive issues.
“Yes, DeAngelo did spend a significant amount of time next to Jaccob Slavin on the Hurricanes’ top pair in 2021-22, and that pair thrived, even if head coach Rod Brind’Amour did his best to still shelter DeAngelo when possible. But Provorov isn’t Slavin, particularly defensively. Giving DeAngelo top pair minutes seems like a serious risk, especially with Ristolainen right behind him on the depth chart. It’s just not an ideally structured blue line group.”
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If anyone in the Flyers’ organization is surprised by DeAngelo basically being exactly who he has always been and was most likely to remain, they only have themselves to blame.
After all, none of this is really DeAngelo’s fault. He’s scored points, leading all Philadelphia blueliners with 31 in 48 games. Tortorella has regularly praised him for his dynamic offensive ability, and he did so repeatedly Thursday even while pointing out his defensive flaws.
The bear has remained a bear.
It’s not his fault that the Flyers’ front office watched him play next to Slavin for a year on a puck-possession monster of a club and thought he could potentially be the 1RD replacement for Ellis, and paid him accordingly to come back to his hometown team to try to do it. That’s on the general manager, assistants and pro scouts who believed he was better than he was, and apparently did not prepare the coaching staff for just how much work DeAngelo would need to do in order to even be competent defensively.
DeAngelo, as Tortorella acknowledged this week, is what he is. And the decision to acquire him in the first place — and pay him like a far better player than he actually is — stands as yet another total misevaluation from the Philadelphia front office.
(Photo: James Guillory / USA Today)