Everyone’s favorite scapegoat, Jonathan Ericsson played in an expanded role this past season. While many of the fans are counting down the days until his contract expires, he made the most of his opportunity in what had mostly no expectations. The season started off well for the nine-year veteran, but as things progressed his flaws became more visible. Reinforcing that he is nowhere near the caliber of defensemen he was being used as.

On a positive note, he was able to play in 81 games; only the second time in his career he has been able to crack over 75 games.

From the PET chart, Ericsson is pretty mediocre. He was slightly above-average in the defensive department, however, the eye test will tell you when he makes a mistake it can get very bad. Just ask Jimmy Howard after the multiple times Ericsson fell on-top of him. He scored at what he was expected to, despite not shooting the puck very much. Transition wise, he’s an absolute train wreck on entries, but that should be expected considering his stay-at-home style.

His exit rate as a whole is above-average, which shows when he’s not making mistakes he can be an effective defender (not so much in transition based on his denied entry rates). However, performing poorly in possession exits makes sense, considering he was fourth on the team in turnovers.

To sum it up, when he plays well, he plays well – you just don’t notice. When he doesn’t play well, you REALLY NOTICE. Offensively he doesn’t make much of an impact. This all suggest he is playing too many minutes, and doesn’t belong in his top-4 role. Put him in a top-6 spot with a leadership role to a youngster, and he can be worth the money.

As mentioned before, Ericsson was able to stay healthy this year – skating in all but one game. That is certainly good news to hear as he is now on the wrong side of 30.

The 13 points Ericsson put up aren’t spectacular, but his presence is mostly felt in the defensive zone. A large part of his lack of production when the team is in the offensive zone is he does not activate nor step up very often. Which is evident from his scoring-chances-for percentage ranking 17th on the team. His lack of aggression made it difficult for the forwards to generate offense, and with the minutes he was receiving, it handicapped their offensive creativity.

His career overall has been extremely consistent and on par with this past season. He has always been in the 10-15 point range and 1-3 goal range. This year was just more of the same.

This shouldn’t be much of a surprise as we’ve already established Ericsson isn’t exactly an offensive catalyst. Nevertheless, his corsi is still no bueno. His corsi-for percentage at even strength of 47.72 is 17th on the team. Relative to his teammates he ranks 18th.

Once again, it is mainly due to his stay-at-home style, but that can be redundant. Ericsson wasn’t elite in either regard, so it’s hard to feel comfortable with his corsi rating.

What doesn’t help is when his teammates were unable to suppress shots, he wasn’t blocking them. He ranked 6th on the team in shots blocked, but last among defensemen. That could be due to his lack of physicality and assertion in front of his own net. He more or less stands there (unless he is on-top of Howard) and I say this in the nicest way possible, like a traffic cone.

I’m not going to go too far into his goal based stats. Its become repetition at this point, but he isn’t very active offensively. Therefore he doesn’t score a lot. All his goal based stats ranked in the bottom half of the team.

From the looks of it, Detroit doesn’t appear to be making significant changes to their blue-line next season. We may see Joe Hicketts or Filip Hronek crack the team, but for the most part nothing major. Combine that with the return of Jeff Blashill and it looks like Ericsson will be staying in his current top-4 role. Ideally he would be on the third pair (where I believe he would perform very well) but even if one of the rookies warrant more ice-time, I would opt to move Danny DeKeyser or Niklas Kronwall down before him (man this blue-line sucks).

With that said, best case scenario for the 2018-19 season, I see Ericsson repeating his performance next season. Little offensive input, with somewhat decent defensive play and the occasional face palm.

Overall, Ericsson’s season can be described as mediocre. For defenders like him, all you can hope for is you never notice him. That makes a good stay-at-home defenseman. There were instances where he was noticed. However, considering his abilities he was put in an awkward position. Playing 19:19 minutes per-game is a bit much to ask of him, as well as being on the top-pair early in the season. There were flashes when he played quite well.

It wasn’t a pretty season, but it could have been much worse.