Is New Jersey Devils captain Nico Hischier's top-10 Selke placement deserved?

Voting for the Frank J. Selke Trophy was unveiled today, with 100-point center Nick Suzuki taking home the award by receiving 151 first-place votes in a landslide victory -- a predictable, well-deserved outcome.

Further down the list -- ninth place, to be exact -- was New Jersey Devils' captain Nico Hischier. All told, he received 33 votes: two for first place, 10 for second, seven for third, five for fourth, and nine for fifth. For a player who has been named Aleksander Barkov 2.0 by many a pundit, perhaps the result was a bit underwhelming.

This holds especially true given that Hischier led the NHL in faceoffs won by a very large margin -- 1,008 to 839, to be specific. That might not matter to some, myself included, but it does take stock in many a PWHA voter's brain when it comes to this award in particular. Furthermore, the Selke is heavily reputation-based, and given Hischier's reputation of being a defensive stalwart, one would think that a finish within the top five would be reasonable on a yearly basis.

All that said, ninth place is a more than respectable finish, and garnering first-place votes in any capacity for any award is an achievement. The question is, did he deserve it?

The answer is a bit complicated, a sort of "yes, but also no" conclusion. On one hand, within the scope of the top ten Selke finishers, Hischier finished ninth in defensive wins above replacement (WAR) and ninth in defensive expected wins above replacement (xWAR) according to Evolving Hockey. On the flipside of things, Hischier's defensive WAR was negative, and his xWAR was exactly zero. In layman's terms, that means that, at best, the Swiss-born two-way center was a net neutral in his own end.

Hischier's Selke deservedness has always been a bit of a contested topic between the analytics and eye-test communities. Analytics-centric analysis has always noted that his defensive numbers have historically been subpar -- his worth as a player has generally been on the offensive side of things rather than his two-way play, and his penalty-killing numbers have been middling at best throughout his career. The eye-test crowd will note that he constantly gets matched up against the opposition's best and generally wins his minutes, takes (and wins) a ton of faceoffs, and is trusted to be an all-situations pivot.

We tend to side with the group that favors underlying numbers, with the opinion that Hischier is better served as an offensive weapon than a shutdown center.

Regardless, ninth place is nothing to scoff at. It's another notch in his Selke belt, now garnering votes in four consecutive seasons. Perhaps one of these seasons, he will deservedly win the award he seems destined to compete for while donning a Devils uniform.

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