Tales From The Clipped: Has Esa Lindell, the puck mover, finally arrived?
No. But he's becoming much more interesting than that.
Two years ago I wrote about Esa Lindell here at the Substack right after Rick Bowness left and Pete DeBoer was brought in. It wasn’t a very charitable picture of the Finnish defender. In some ways, Dallas had chosen Lindell over John Klingberg, which felt like madness at the time.
However, I want to give some weight to my closing paragraphs.
I do think just as we’ve seen player performance fluctuate under different coaches and systems, it’s possible Pete DeBoer might unlock some of the offensive potential Lindell was originally drafted for. It’s important to remember that it wasn’t just offensive defenders like Burns and Theodore he (DeBoer) had get more involved in the play. It was also players like Marc-Edouard Vlasic and Nick Holden that DeBoer had shooting more. Lindell has a really good wrist shot, and powers through single lanes with momentum and confidence. With the lack of defenders able to fill in an offensive role and the need for players like Lindell to step up, could this be another perfect marriage?
Being critical of him always made sense in my head. Lindell is a static player; modern hockey is a dynamic playground; of course he’s not what people think.
I lowkey hated that contract too; not because Lindell wasn’t worth it, but because Dallas paid a market price for a stay-at-home player that didn’t exist (the market I mean). Esa Lindell was given an AAV of $5.8M before players like Erik Cernak, Adam Pelech, Vladislav Gavrikov and Mattias Ekholm ever got paid (and except for Ekholm, they still get paid less). Point is, a lot of things converged for me to be critical of Lindell, but I’d like to think I respected his game, even if I didn’t personally like it.
However, I won’t walk the bulk of that analysis back either. If anything, a look at Lindell’s growth only strengthens my observations early in his career. Modern-day Lindell under DeBoer is a mindful shutdown defensemen who willingly activates. The Lindell of years past? Exactly what I surmised: a player that got more credit for his role than his performance; a player with some strengths, but who couldn’t leverage those strengths into a more tangible on-ice impact.
When you look at his shift-to-shift net rating from season to season, that appears to hold true, more or less. (Synthetic goals are their own model, and something I’d advise you read up on.)
Four-ish seasons profiling like a third pairing defender’s shift to shift impact, three like a second pairing defender, and only the last two as the top pairing defender he’s always been billed as — the stars have needed to align a bit, but the pattern is clear.
Lindell was drafted to be an offensive defender. It’s a role he embraced before stepping foot in North America. It’s also a role Dallas immediately took away from him. It makes a certain sense that under DeBoer and his system of offensive and defensive balance, that Lindell can focus on developing back into the player he once was.
Has Lindell’s profile suddenly changed? Is this an about-face? Yes (in a big way) and no (in a more complicated way).