lol Drew Doughty as a defensive defender

I would have Dumoulin ahead of Ekholm.

Fully healthy, Hjalmarsson is head and shoulders above everyone. Doughty hasn't been the defensive stalwart of days gone by for a couple of years now.

Weber and Doughty are two-way defensemen

Healthy Hammer
Pesce
Ekholm

Slavin

Dillon
Gio

Tanev

Weber



Pickles
Doughty
Not healthy Hammer

Vlasic & Doughty aren't even good defenders.

I'd say best defensive dmen (according to the #'s) are

Hjalmarsson , Brodin, Dillon, McAvoy, Lindholm, Siegenthaler, Gavrikov, Weegar, Braun, Pelech, Ekholm, Parayko

Hockey-reference.com (great stat site) has a rating category called Point Shares, which they break down into offensive and defensive point shares, and then total point shares. Similar to win shares in baseball. I think everyone would be slightly surprised by who ranks where. You can find it here: https://www.hockey-reference.com/leagues/NHL_2020_skaters-misc.html#stats::dps (make sure you sort by the DPS column on the right.

You can read about point shares here: https://www.hockey-reference.com/about/point_shares.html

Conducting very minimal research my list is as follows:

1. Salvin
2. Hjalmarsson
3. Pesce
4. Ekholm
5. Dillon
6. Tanev
7. Giordano
8. Weber
9. Vlasic
10. Doughty

Nice to see Hammer get some recognition.

Huh? How are players like Weber, Giordano and Doughty defensive dmen?

Defensive dmen (at least in the way I interpret it) are guys who don't put up a lot of points because they completely sacrifice scoring opportunity for safe defensive plays. Half of the guys above don't apply here.

Just focusing on the defensive abilities here.

Guess i shouldnt have put DFD.

also in the desc. i put rank based on defensive ability.

How do you measure defensive effectiveness? If you look at 5v5 GA/60 among the 154 defensemen that played over 750 minutes this season, names like Russell, Heiskanen, Hamilton, Carlo, Chara, Scandella, Mayfield, Parayko, Graves, Boumeester, Cole, Hedman and Jones appear in the top-20. Kris Russell is 2nd on that list, BTW. If you want a cheap defensive specialist, he's your man. If you look at all defensemen that have played 3000+ minutes over the past 3 years, Russell is 28th best in GA/60, right behind Seth Jones and just ahead of Josh Manson.

B Carlo...
Big Zee...still 21 min per nite and +26

Defensive capabilty is a lot of personal opinions.

Defensive capabilities rely on a lot of different things: Which coach you play for, style the team plays, defense partner, teammates...etc

Its an interesting conversation

I would look at how the coach uses a player mostly. Who gets the toughest assignments? Who gets the defensive zone starts? Who gets the PK time? Who does the coach trust to protect a 1-goal lead late in the game?

Yes exactly, lots of different factors

dumoulin still getting no love

Some good points.
As per NHL.com, the top-5 PK teams are below (yeah it's a team effort but you gotta think at least one D-man from these squads makes the list):
1) SJ
2) EDM (for example this coach was an excellent PK man in playing days)
3) BOS
4) CAR (this coach was)
5) ARI (and this coach was too...)!

Just straight up defensive ability, man that's tough........... A lot of dmen are great defensively but because offensively they are garbage, people tend to not give them too high praise.

I think a lot of non all star like dmen are just as good defensively as the well known perennial Norris likes. Ranking them is really tough, not sure where and how to start to be honest.

All I can say is Vlasic, back in his hay day, was probably one of the best defensive only dmen in the league. Obviously now, not so much.