The New Ristolainen, And The Mastermind Behind It

Rasmus Ristolainen looks like a new person.

Before coming to Philadelphia, and for his first year with the Flyers, Rasmus Ristolainen was objectively terrible at every aspect of NHL hockey. Relative to the best league in the world, he was a disaster who had no business playing.

He wasn’t good offensively, despite soaking up PP points for a couple of seasons in Buffalo. He wasn’t good defensively. No advanced stat would ever imply he was good at anything. No trained eye test would ever imply he was good. There was a small contingent of people who were so obsessed with the physical side of the game that Rasmus Ristolainen—because of his continued presence on the top of the yearly hits leaderboard–became their savior. And those were the only individuals who saw, even, a singular redeeming trait in an otherwise hopeless facsimile of an NHL defenseman.

Reflexively, that may seem over the top. And I concede that the wording may be a bit dramatic, but the sentiments are correct. It wasn’t good. He was bad relative to other NHL players. That the Flyers signed him to a contract worth over 5 million dollars per season, at the time, seemed like a tragedy and a war crime.

And yet… since approximately 10 games into the 2023-24 season… Rasmus seems like a new man. Someone who objectively is a good player at the NHL level, and someone who you would desire on an NHL team.

The Leafs are reportedly interested in Rasmus Ristolainen, who's coming off of one of the only not-bad seasons of his career. Worth the risk for a guy with four years left on his deal? #LeafsForever pic.twitter.com/jyadRe6g6G

— JFresh (@JFreshHockey) December 7, 2023

The RAPM model–whether you’re skeptical or not–is the best summary of what Ristolainen has become. Don’t focus on the numbers. Focus on the season-by-season trajectory of the graphs on the right. He started in an awful place, which would be enforced and supported by any eye test worth its salt.

Then, he became… a genuine defensive stopper. Someone who was in the 80th+ percentile of NHL defensemen at limiting the scoring chances that their team surrenders while they’re on the ice. A premium stopper, in other words.

Some of this came at the cost of offensive value. He went from the 50th percentile to the 25th percentile in helping his team generate scoring chances, but the trade-off was well worth it. At this point, we have nearly a full season’s worth of games to confirm that this is real.

Rasmus Ristolainen has become a genuinely proficient stay-at-home defenseman.

The new ceiling

Now that we know what Risto has become, it’s worth asking–for a mostly rebuilding team, especially–what role they’d ideally play on a championship contender. If you’re putting together a roster that you think can take you to a Cup, and you were going to slot in this new Ristolainnen, where would you place him?

Well, outside of the raw analytics, it helps to understand what new Risto is. He’s a black hole where offense goes to die. Your offense, and the other team’s. He’s a vacuum that sucks up the mere potential for scoring chances. When he’s on the ice, in most situations, nothing will happen. There will be a dearth of events. A blank shift, almost.

That has value on a contender, but mostly in 1 of 2 ways.

1. On a third pair, with someone as averse to offense as he is, by his side. Someone you can shove out for 15-20 minutes a night, depending on need, and just rely on him to ensure that nothing at all happens. If you can do it against top players, and Risto can, then that’s a good piece to have. It’s a card you want to play.
2. A properly insulated member of your top 4.

I don’t typically love the thought that there’s a “driver” and a “supplementary piece” of a defensive pair. The best defensive pairs are synergistic and will be better with each other than without one another. Ristolainen can bring value to a top-4 pairing, but it has to be with someone who can conceal his weaknesses.

His weaknesses are two-fold, and they’re the reason his offensive value is so lowly valued by RAPM models or any similar advanced on-ice statistic.

For one, he still doesn’t move the puck very well. He doesn’t find teammates with passes that have feathery touch. Even when he’s going up the wall, he won’t send a playable puck to the strong-side winger. He’ll just lob a grenade so ham-fistedly that even Nikita Kucherov would have some struggles fielding that puck.

That means your team has trouble generating speed through the neutral zone when he’s on the ice, and that means that both dries up rush opportunities as well as makes your forechecks less effective.

His other issue is that he doesn’t defend his blue line very well. Before, in Buffalo, he would encounter a puck carrier trying to gain entry into the offensive zone… and he’d try to plaster them into the boards. That would frequently fail, and he’d usually get dangled out of his skates and give up a rush chance instead of just merely conceding the entry.

Someone with better instincts and better lateral mobility would be able to dispossess the puck carrier, force a turnover, and send play in the other direction. The scoring chances his team generates from those quick-hitting defensive plays would help contribute to a more offensive value in his game overall.

Instead, Risto has been taught to concede the blueline more often than not. Make a play when it’s there. But don’t chase it. He plays defense with a “bend but don’t break” mentality.

He’ll concede the blueline. Keep himself and his stick in position to contain the threat. Wait for the opponent to misplay. Then force a battle. He’ll win the battle, because he’s genuinely good at that, then launch the puck into the stratosphere. And then it’ll be time for a change.

There’s a lot of value in most of that. If you pair him, for example, with someone like Cam York… who specializes in giving his forwards playable pucks and forcing early turnovers in defensive sequences… then you get all the benefits of Risto with much less of the drawbacks.

With York, in particular, who’s a smaller defenseman that just simply won’t win as many netfront battles as you’d ideally like. That can result in a team giving up more actual goals than they’re “expected,” over time. And someone like Risto can counteract that issue if it happens to arise.

Either way, it’s worth bringing up the man who masterminded this transformation.

Is Brad Shaw not long for Philadelphia?

We should note that, while John Tortorella deserves the credit for seeing the problem when Risto’s previous head coaches did not, the person who went about the business of making technical changes in the Finnish defenseman’s game was Brad Shaw. The assistant coach who’s responsible for both the penalty kill and the deployment/development of the defensemen in Philadelphia.

That happens to be a comprehensive list of the two most pleasant surprises in Flyers land. For an assistant coach, that is impressive work. Astoundingly impressive.

Shaw had already accepted two interviews for head coaching positions last year with Anaheim and Washington. Both teams ultimately went in different directions. But with the job he’s doing? He’ll keep being brought in for interviews, and it’s only a matter of time before someone ultimately gives him a head coaching position.

Maybe it’s worth the Flyers getting ahead of this and making themselves the team that gives him that position.

Mandatory Credit: Eric Hartline-USA TODAY Sports