Will Butcher’s tenure with the New Jersey Devils obviously didn’t end the way anyone wanted it to. The star college free agent signed with the team right before the exciting 2017-2018 season. After a team rebuild and new additions, paired with less than stellar play, Butcher was expendable and traded to Buffalo this past offseason. The Devils actually had to send over a fifth round draft pick to Buffalo as part of the salary dump to take on Butcher’s cap hit.
Butcher had a great 2017-2018 season as an offensive defenseman, scoring 44 points in 81 games. That season was obviously an anomaly as everyone on the team over-performed resulting in the Devils making the playoffs. Butcher hasn’t gotten over 30 points in a season since then, although he played in nearly every game. We’ll cut him some slack as his second to last season in New Jersey was unexpectedly cut short. But, during his last season head coach Lindy Ruff regularly kept him out of the lineup. If you still believe in plus-minus being a useful stat, that 2017-2018 season was his only season in the positive.
Butcher isn’t doing that much better in Buffalo. Sure, Buffalo is in a scorched Earth rebuild of a rebuild, but they have been better than people thought early in the season. Butcher has played in 13 of the team’s 15 games, earning only two assists. So what made that 2017-2018 season have Butcher look like a point scoring machine? Not surprisingly, it may have been Taylor Hall.
Enter Mr. Lottery Magic
The 2017-2018 Devils over performed mostly due to Hall’s MVP Hart Trophy winning season. He elevated the play to the point it put duct tape over other holes in the lineup. We saw next season how much the team suffered as soon as Hall was taken out of the equation.
It was recently speculated that Butcher was only as good as he was that year because he was able to play with Hall and pick up points off the offense Hall generated. It was an interesting idea, yet one that’s totally plausible. We went back and looked at every one of the 44-points Butcher scored that season and 19 of them either came off a goal or share an assist with Taylor Hall. That’s good for 46% of his points coming with Taylor Hall.
The next season Butcher put up a respectable 30 points. Eight of those came with assists or goals shared with Taylor Hall. Hall would only play until the December 23rd game until an injury kept him out of the lineup the rest of the season. The next season it appears Butcher let up a little on his reliance on Hall. Through the first 28 games of the 2019-2020 season prior to his trade to the Arizona Coyotes, only two of Butcher’s nine points came with Taylor Hall earning an assist of goal.
What About Tony DeAngelo
The “Butcher only got points because Taylor Hall,” argument reminded me of a certain former New York Rangers turned Carolina Hurricane Tony DeAngelo. DeAngelo is quite the controversial character, but he did have a monster 53 points in 68 games in the shortened 2019-2020 season. Did playing with Artemi Panarin have the same effect on DeAngelo that playing with Hall had on Butcher?
The results are pretty similar. DeAngelo had 22 of those 53 points come on either a goal or assist shared with Panarin. That’s good for 41.5% compared to Butcher’s 46% percent. To put this in terms of an adjusted 82-game season, DeAngelo would have finished with 63.91 points (let’s call it 64 for sake of this example.). Rounding up, that would mean he shared 27 points with Panarin, going off that 41.5% established earlier. If he had been scoring with Panarin at the 46% Butcher was with Hall, Panarin and DeAngelo would have shared 29.44 points, so only one extra point than how Butcher and Hall actually played out.
DeAngelo is In Carolina Now
Considering DeAngelo is with the Hurricanes now, we can compare his Panarin-less statistics similar to how we compared Butcher’s stats without Hall. So far, DeAngelo has 14 points in 14 games. Even without Panarin, Carolina has some gifted offensive talent on the same level with Sebastian Aho and at the same position (winger) in Andrei Svechnikov. DeAngelo shared five points with Aho, good for 35.7%, and six with Svechnikov, good for 42.8%.
DeAngelos’s point shared with Aho is lower than his points shared with Panarin, and lower than Hall’s was with Butcher. His point shared is roughly similar with Svechnikov as it was with Panarin. That was expected, since Svechnikov plays a similar position and game. Six of DeAngelo’s 14 points came on the power play. Carolina’s top power play unit includes all three of Svechnikov, Aho, and DeAgnelo.
What’s The Verdict On Butcher
Butcher and DeAngelo don’t play the same type of defensive game, but for this sake of argument they’re easily comparable to playing with star power. DeAngelo has offensive weapons in Carolina that Butcher would only dream of having in Buffalo. Does that mean if we give him a star winger that Butcher can become the 2018-2019 version of himself once again?
Even with Hall gone, Butcher played with talented players such as Kyle Palmieri and Nico Hischier. He never found similar success with either. Then again, Hall is on a completely different level than those two.