Has Johnny Boychuk Been Reborn as an Offensive D-Man with New York Islanders?

In an NHL career primarily spent with the Boston Bruins that spanned more than 300 games, Johnny Boychuk had all of one power-play goal. Then he got traded to the New York Islanders and scored twice on the man advantage in just three games.

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With six points in those first three games, it looked like Boston had badly miscast Boychuk as a solely defensive defenceman. However, in the five games since Boychuk is pointless, and the return of Lubomir Visnovsky to the Islanders’ lineup has coincided with a demotion for Boychuk off the top power-play unit. Does this suggest that Boychuk’s success was an aberration, and that he’ll go back to being the player he was for the Bruins?

To answer that question, it’s important to go back and see how Boychuk has performed offensively over his career. Was he never given an opportunity, or did he have a chance to make an impression and simply fail to do so?  

Boychuk had some offensive potential coming out junior; he scored 40 points with the Calgary Hitmen in his draft year. Scouts praised his tools, but not his toolkit; some of the comments made in The Hockey News’ 2002 Draft Preview are telling.

“He has all the tools to be in your top six or seven players,” one unidentified scout told the publication. “He can skate, hit, shoot. Everything is there. He can play physical, has a great shot, but he’s not a thinking man’s player.”

The same snippet on Boychuk saw an NHL general manager criticizing the player’s hockey sense, while another scout said that a team needed to “make this guy play like a robot” to turn him into an NHL player.

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Colorado ended up drafting Boychuk late in the second round that year, but after four seasons of uneven results at the minor pro level they dealt him to Boston for 27-year-old minor league forward Matt Hendricks (a late bloomer who would graduate to the majors after another year in the AHL).

Boychuk too was assigned to the minors by the Bruins, and the results were a little surprising: In his first campaign with a new organization he exploded offensively. The same player who in four AHL seasons had only topped 30 points on a single occasion suddenly more than doubled his career high, putting home 20 goals and 65 points in 78 games.

Most of that scoring came on the man advantage; 35 points in all came via the power play. He was an incredible volume shooter, putting 289 shots on net; for the sake of comparison, Ottawa’s Erik Karlsson led all defencemen last season with 257 shots. Very few defencemen in any league can average better than three shots per game.

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The reward for Boychuk’s efforts was an NHL job, but an NHL job with a decidedly auxiliary role on the power play. The presence of Zdeno Chara, Dennis Wideman and either Derek Morris (pre-trade deadline) or Dennis Seidenberg (post-deadline) meant that Boychuk ended up averaging just over one minute per game on the man advantage.

Boychuk did pretty well in those limited minutes; the power play averaged more goals, shots and shot attempts with him on the ice than it did with anyone else in that group, and Boychuk’s personal scoring totals were roughly middle of the pack among NHL defencemen once ice time was taken into account.

Boychuk again played a role on the power play the following season, but something interesting happened. Once again, Boychuk led all regular Boston defencemen in terms of shots on ice per hour (though the group was only middle of the pack in terms of shot attempts), but the club’s shooting percentage imploded.

Of the 104 defencemen to appear in half their team’s games and averaged at least a minute per contest in five-on-four play, only four saw an on-ice shooting percentage below the 6.7 percent the Bruins fired when Boychuk was on the ice. Unsurprisingly, with the shooters not finishing goals for falling off the face of the earth, Boychuk’s point totals went south with it.

That stretch marked the end of Boychuk’s time on the power play. He would play three more seasons in Boston; he’d never manage to even crack 20 seconds per game on the man advantage over those years.

It would be nice if we had more detailed data on Boychuk’s time in the AHL, if statistics were publicly available recording how much time he got on the power play in the minors in the years before his breakout season. All we know for sure is that he had one brilliantly effective campaign at that level, and that in two seasons in the NHL the results were extremely positive one year and passable the next. Based on what we know, it’s certainly well within the realm of possibility that Boychuk is a legitimate power-play scoring option.

The Islanders should be a good test of that. It’s unlikely that Boychuk will unseat Visnovsky, an excellent power-play weapon with 50 career goals on the man advantage, but he should certainly stay in the rotation for some time to come. It’s entirely possible that he’ll take advantage of an opportunity he was never really granted by the Bruins.

Jonathan Willis covers the NHL for Bleacher Report. Follow him on Twitter for more of his work. Statistics via behindthenet.ca, theAHL.com and NHL.com.