We're going to have to agree to disagree that he did good. He was a pylon out there and Kings play suffered when he was on the ice. Advanced stats show that Doughty was significantly worse when he was paired with MacD.

I hope the guy gets better and makes it, but he was not NHL ready last season and they rightly returned him to the AHL.

Yeah gotta agree here. It was his first taste on NHL so hopefully he improves, but his corsi and rel corsi was one of the worst on the team. And now with Brickley added can't see him cracking the top 7 D to start the season.

Where do you see these stats?Lol. And i was using that as a point he's not a 1st line D man, he was a good pair for Martinez and they did really good together and that was when the Kings were doing best. You believe and focus too much on advanced statistics.

The fact is he was paired with Doughty from time to time. People say he's too "slow" yet he was never completely burned. He was my favorite player coming up last season, i watched him VERY closely.

McDermid & Doughty @ Corsica.hockey

If you look at Drew Doughty's relative metrics while playing with Forbort, then look at them while playing with MacDermid, you can clearly see a trend. Normally offensive defensemen will see a high relative CF/60 and high CA/60 since they're generating more offense, but they're probably allowing more chances against since they get stuck in the offensive zone on occasion. Defensive defensemen will see a low relative CF/60 and a low CA/60 because they don't take as many chances on offense, which leaves them in position to defend well and prevent chances.

While paired together at even strength, Doughty and MacDermid had a negative relative CF/60 (-4.59!) and a positive relative CA/60 (2.5), quite literally the worst possible combination. Not only did they not shoot as much as they did when not paired together, but they allowed more shot attempts against.

Now compare that with Doughty and Forbort. Their rel CF/60 was slightly negative (-1.66), but their CA/60 was significantly negative (-6.78), the best on the team by far. So they shot slightly less often than the average defensive pairing for the Kings (but much better than when Doughty and MacDermid were together), but were the best defensive pairing the Kings managed to put together all season.

Now you can say that advanced stats are over-rated and shouldn't be used solely to determine a player's effectiveness, and I would generally agree with you. But I think everyone would agree that when Doughty is on the ice, we either want him getting scoring chances or preventing scoring chances against, and neither of those things happened when he was paired with MacDermid.

The only other player that MacDermid played any significant time with was Martinez, and both the CF/60 (-3.61) and the CA/60 (5.94) are equally as bad. Martinez's numbers are pretty atrocious all over, with his CA/60 numbers being the worst on the team, no matter who he plays with. It's part of the reason why he gets so many blocked shots, it's because when he's on the ice, the other team probably has the puck in the Kings zone.

Subjectively, MacDermid had a couple nice hits and made a few decent plays during his abbreviated season, but he was abysmal along the boards in the defensive zone, and he made poor decisions when he had the puck. It's not entirely his fault, as the Kings needed a physical presence on the blue line and thrust the only player in the system with any physicality into the lineup well before he was ready for the speed and skill of the NHL. He has shown enormous improvement in the AHL over the last few seasons, jumping from 7 or 8 on the depth chart to 1 or 2 last season alongside LaDue, but his play proved that he was not ready for the NHL. I'm not saying that he'll never become ready, but if we're judging by last season's play, he doesn't belong anywhere near the Kings #6/7 spot.

I don't believe in that nonsense. You base everything off the advanced statistics. Good luck finding the perfect defenseman. MacDermid is still developing. I don't know What You were watching because I didn't see anything bad enough to take him off the roster. He's way better than Gravel and Fantenberg. Those guys have no upside. MacDermid is a good stay home defenseman and he's only going to get better.

It's not exactly nonsense. Overused, yes, but certainly better than solely relying on the eye test.

Rosen is currently going through and doing all of the player evaluations for the Kings roster. He'll get to MacDermid when he does "The Others." At that time, you'll be able to read his evaluation and a consensus of Kings fans on how they feel he did. As a regular frequenter of the blog comments section, I can attest that they weren't so high on MacD's play this year, but are cautiously optimistic about the player he could turn into.