There is no shortage of storylines during and after any NHL postseason and 2023 is no different. The problem is a lot of storylines focus on results so if a team loses, there are a bunch of things that went wrong and there are specific players/coaches to blame. If a team wins, there are a bunch of things that went right and there are specific players/coaches to praise.
It isn’t a problem for fans and players because winning the Stanley Cup is the primary goal for any franchise, so focusing on the wins makes sense. It is a problem for analysis, though, because it can easily overrate winners and underrate losers.
One player that didn’t get much press through the playoffs was Dallas defenceman Thomas Harley. Watching the Stars, though, it seemed as if they have a future number-1 blue liner in the making. Here was this 21-year-old skating the puck through the neutral zone, with ease, in the postseason. It was hard to not notice him.
And so, we are going to review his early, pre-Draft career, what he did between being drafted and the 2022-23 season, and then finish with this year’s NHL postseason, with most of it being through a statistical lens. We will be using Natural Stat Trick, Evolving Hockey, HockeyViz, Frozen Tools, and Corey Sznajder’s tracking data as sources, unless otherwise indicated.
Early Days
Born in New York, Harley went to play for Mississauga in the OHL as a teenager and played well enough as a 16-year-old rookie. In his age-17 season, though, he exploded for 58 points in 68 games. Not a huge mark, but a big improvement on the 15 points the year prior, and he led all OHL defencemen that hadn’t yet been drafted.
Scouts were enamoured with him, of course, but the extent of his upside was in question. It wasn’t a matter of his puck skills, but rather a matter of his own defensive play. It’s one of those fun hockey conundrums were the tall defenceman actually isn’t as good defensively as stereotypes might lead us to believe and that his offence is what helps him excel, like Alex Pietrangelo. That link a couple sentences earlier is Corey Pronman’s scouting report on him from 2019 while former Dobber writer/editor Cam Robinson had praise for Harley’s mobility, speed, and puck distribution.
This is where I interject one of my beliefs: it is a lot easier to teach a defenceman how to be effective defensively than it is to teach them to be effective offensively. There is just more puck-skill involved and that makes the learning curve steeper. If I had to coach something into a defenceman, it’s preferable for it to be stick positioning or gap control.
The 2019 Draft saw Harley go 18th overall. That draft also had a lot of high-end defencemen, or at least prospects that were considered high-end at the time, like Bowen Byram, Cam York, Moritz Seider, Victor Soderstrom, Ville Heinola, Philip Broberg, and more. Perhaps he didn’t get the draft slotting like Broberg or Soderstrom, but four years on, that doesn’t matter now.
A final note on that 2019 draft class comes from Byron Bader’s prospect model. According to the model, there were six defencemen in the 2019 draft that had two attributes: at least a 20% chance at becoming a star, and at least a 66% chance of just becoming a regular NHLer. They were as follows:
There is no Soderstrom, no Seider, no Heinola, and no Broberg. I will point out that just one of those guys has made it as an NHL regular as of the end of the 2022-23 season. Players can take time to develop, but they’ll all be 22 years old this season. They aren’t fresh-faced prospects anymore.
Harley went back to the OHL for the 2019-20 season and had 57 points in 59 games. That isn’t much of a points/game jump, but the difference was 18 goals in those 59 contests against 11 in the 68 games the year before. A big reason for that is he jumped from 2.31 shots/game to 3.08 shots/game. He also did that playing for a team that scored about a full goal per game less than the league leaders.
Then the pandemic hit and that was the end of Harley’s OHL career. In the 2020 Bubble season, he made his way to the AHL.
Early Pro Career
Like many prospects, the expanded rosters in the Bubble season made it easy for Harley to spend the season in the AHL. That, in and of itself, would dilute the talent because of the taxi squads the NHL teams had, but Harley still managed 25 points in 38 games, a total that led all rookie AHL defencemen. His points/game mark (0.66) was higher than names like Ryan Merkley (0.35), Lassi Thomson (0.37), Ville Heinola (0.58), and Victor Soderstrom (0.59). Harley finished the season under two shots per game (1.90), but it was still a mark higher than Heinola and Thomson.
All this is to say that in Harley’s first pro season, he out-produced first-rounders older than him, first-rounders that were drafted ahead of him in 2019, and first-rounders that were drafted just behind him in 2019. It sure seemed as if his puck movement and mobility was showing out very early for him.
I was looking for scouting reports at the time but there’s not a lot from the end of the 2021 Bubble season. One I could find discusses how more rounded his game had become but it’s not extensive or explanatory, really.
There was a brief interview with John Matisz where Harley talks about how his skating helps him cover himself defensively, and that’s what allows him to take so many chances offensively. There is a difference between OHL/AHL speed and NHL speed, but he’s completely right and that kind of mentality is nice to see in an attacking blue liner.
2021-22
The proceeding season saw Harley split time between the AHL and NHL. We will discuss the NHL, but I did want to mention that despite a lack of production in the AHL that year (0 goals, 11 assists in 27 contests), Harley finished a shade shy of two shots per game with 27 in 53. A jump in shot rate in the AHL, even a small one, is good to see. Is it the NHL, though, that we should focus on.
Despite just four points in 34 NHL games, Harley played very well. The team was outscored 20-17 with him on the ice but they carried 54.5% of the expected goal share with him on the ice, a near-identical mark to Miro Heiskanen.
The cause of being outscored was goals against, and turnovers were at the root. Harley spent more ice time with John Klingberg than any other Dallas blue liner that year, and he and Klingberg were both easily below-average in failing to exit the zone when retrieving the puck. Conversely, the only Stars defenceman with a higher percentage of zone exits with possession than Harley was Joel Hanley. In short, it appears there was a lot of risk/reward going on with Harley, and defensive zone retrievals were nearly binary: clean exits or turnovers. That isn’t really surprising, given his history, but it does highlight what was going on to cause so many goals against.
It isn’t to say that there were myriad defensive issues, because there weren’t. He was in the middle of the Stars blue liners in terms of entries allowed that led to opposition scoring chances and teams carried the puck against his blue line just 55.7% of the time. That carry percentage was better than the NHL average, again in the middle of the Stars rearguards, and similar to names like Alex Pietrangelo (55.7%), Adam Fox (55.9%), and Brent Burns (56%).
He didn’t play a lot of games, so it means a small sample to work with, but Harley showed very well basically everywhere in 2021-22. The team’s expected goals against/60 at 5-on-5 with him on the ice was 2.44, a number that rose to 2.53 with him off the ice. In the offensive zone, it was even better. This was Dallas’s attack with Harley on the ice:
And with him off the ice:
Yes, he did very well driving the play at both ends. So well, in fact, that his expected goals impact at even strength in 2021-22 exceeded names like Evan Bouchard, Noah Dobson, Cam York, Bowen Byram, Quinn Hughes, and Rasmus Dahlin. The problem was turning those expected goals into actual goals, an area he fell behind all those names except Dahlin (which is notable, given Dahlin’s breakout in 22-23).
His issue on offence was his passing. Tracking data has him below average in virtually every important playmaking metric that is tracked like scoring chance assists, high-danger assists, and deflection assists:
Being mobile and able to jump into the play is good, and taking a high rate of shots is also good, especially for a rookie 20-year-old defenceman. Adding that playmaking dimension is what was necessary to really unlock his next level of offensive potential.
2022-23 Regular Season
It was back to the AHL for Harley in 2022-23. With Heiskanen, Esa Lindell, Ryan Suter, Colin Miller, Jani Hakanpaa, and the newly-acquired Nils Lundkvist, spots were thin on the main roster. It was Lundkvist that won the final spot and started the season in the NHL, sending Harley back to the minors.
After a blip in production the prior year, the 21-year-old American really exploded offensively in the AHL this past season. He put up 10 goals and 34 points in 66 games, leading the Texas blue line in goals. He didn’t have an exceptional points season – names like Darren Raddysh, Jordan Spence, Ville Heinola, and Samuel Bolduc all exceeded him in point totals. It isn’t the AHL that I’m interested in here, though. The interest is in the 2023 NHL Playoffs.
With Lundkvist falling out of favour, Harley was called up towards the end of the regular season and played a handful of games. It foreshadowed the postseason where Harley would play all 19 games.
2022-23 NHL Playoffs
First, it’s clear the coaching staff started trusting him more. Over the team’s first eight playoff games, Harley was last on the blue line in 5-on-5 TOI per game, trailing Miller by a half-dozen seconds but trailing the second pair by over a minute and a half. That changed over the final 11 games as Harley earned the fourth-most 5-on-5 TOI per game on their blue line, exceeding Miller and Hakanpaa. The latter underwent knee surgery after the season, so that’s part of it, but being a number-4 on a Western Conference Finalist at the age of 21 is certainly not nothing.
As for how he performed, it was, in a word, good. His scoring chance assist rate – something that was a huge problem for him in the 2021-22 regular season, remember – was 2.29/60 minutes at 5-on-5. For reference to other blue liners in the playoffs, Victor Hedman was at 2.45, Brent Burns at 2.17, and Shea Theodore finished with 1.95. He didn’t get many chances on his own, but he did create a lot for his teammates. There is probably a very good reason Harley had the second-highest on-ice goal rate for Stars defencemen in the playoffs, trailing only Joel Hanley.
Out of the 76 defencemen in the playoff sample, Harley finished 10th by zone exits with possession at nearly 82%. For reference, the league median was a little over 62%, so he was far clear of that. Put that together with his scoring chance assist jump and there was a lot of good for Harley in the postseason on offence. Not just “good for a typical NHL defenceman”, either. It was good for high-end defencemen, and he started showing the playmaking dimension he needed.
It was also a good performance on defence. Harley was better than the league in failed zone exits, meaning he was turning the puck over a lot less than he did the year before. He compared favourably to names like Mikhail Sergachev, Charlie McAvoy, and Shea Theodore. And, again, this is in the playoffs, not the regular season.
Finally, he did a great job just outright denying the blue line. The percentage of entries he stopped at the blue line was in the 92nd percentile of playoff defencemen, in the neighbourhood of defensive stalwarts like Brett Pesce, Adam Pelech, and Jonas Siegenthaler. That is, uh, good.
Dallas had five defencemen play at least 15 postseason games. Of those five defencemen, Harley was the only one with a positive goal differential (17-15). When we see how good his playmaking was, to go with his controlled zone exits, and then throw in pretty good defence, maybe it shouldn’t be such a surprise.
Moving Forward
It is really, really hard to not get over-excited about this type of player. His offensive skills were obvious as a teenager, and it’s why he ended up as a top-20 pick in the 2019 Draft. Those offensive skills are the first thing that we are introduced to and it’s hard to let go of that anchoring bias.
Like every draftee, he had things to work on, and that was namely his playmaking and his defence. He struggled in these areas in his first regular season back in 2021-22 season, so maybe there was a good reason to send him to the AHL for the following campaign. His playoff performance, though, showed that he has been working a lot on those things. It is still just a 19-game sample, but to have such good playmaking and such good defensive metrics in a 19-game playoff sample is hard to ignore.
That’s why it’s hard to not get excited. We had a defenceman with a wealth of offensive upside as a prospect but with clear holes in his game that needed improving. Small samples aside, it seems as if he’s improved those things not only to an adequate level, but to a high-end one.
We need to see a full season of this out of Harley before determining him a star – pun intended – but he now has all the pieces. It isn’t a case of needing to see improvement, either; we aren’t hoping that a prospect adds a skill or two to his repertoire to unlock that next level of upside. We are hoping that the improved skills Harley worked on carry over, and that’s a different thing entirely. Fans certainly want to see him keep getting better, but simply maintaining the level of play he showed in the postseason would turn out an exceptional defenceman. Time will tell where he ultimately ends up on the depth chart, but it would not surprise me if, a couple years from now, we’re talking about Heiskanen-Harley among the top 1-2 options on defence for any team in the NHL.
Cliffy's hell-hole 