Daily Faceoff Archetype Rankings: ‘Clutch’ is code word for ‘Selke’

Part II in a Series

When you think of a “clutch” player in professional sports, you most often think of the player you want with the puck on their stick in Game 7, or up to bat in the bottom of the ninth, or leading your team on a two-minute drive down the field for the win.

That is one way to define clutch, a player who comes through at clutch times.

For the second part of our Daily Faceoff Archetypes Ranking project, where we’re sorting top players into nine different classification categories, we’re going to use that word in a slightly different way – more as in a “clutch” player who helps your team win every night, someone critical for success.

How else do you define a collection of players who really refuse to be defined?

The one bond of our Top 20 Clutch Players is that they’re elite, but not in any one specific area of the game. They aren’t shooters or playmakers. They’re not power forwards. They’re good at everything. Clutch is a catch-all basket. They’re the most well-rounded skaters in the league, the ones who most often have the “200-foot player” cliche attached to their names. Naturally, they are also the ones who pile up the most votes for the Selke Trophy.

For that, we could have called them the Selke Squad. Or Pressure Players. Or Puck Retrievers. Or Team Relentless. They are also all a pain in the ass to play against. With all of those things mashed together, perhaps the best name for the archetype is Clutch, because they’re essential for winning.

Our working definition of a Clutch player is someone who creates pressure at both ends of the ice, relentlessly pursues and retrieves pucks, is good on the walls and wins battles in all key areas.

With the help of five anonymous front office executives, we found five data points that help define the Clutch player: steals, loose puck recoveries, defensive zone recoveries, offensive zone dump-in recoveries, and individual scoring chances, with all data provided by Stathletes.

Here are Daily Faceoff’s Top 20 projected Clutch Players for the 2022-23 season, with their league-wide rank from last season in those categories:

Rank	Player	Team	Age	Pos	Goals	Pts	DZ Recov	Loose Recov	OZ Dump Recov	SC	Steals
1	Patrice Bergeron	BOS	37	C	25	65	30	39	96	24	72
2	Sebastian Aho	CAR	25	C	37	81	50	21	26	16	53
3	Elias Lindholm	CGY	27	C	42	82	17	57	170	9	82
4	Mika Zibanejad	NYR	29	C	29	81	21	18	203	64	5
5	Brayden Point	TBL	26	C	28	58	191	127	107	3	257
6	Ryan O’Reilly	STL	31	C	21	58	11	28	76	51	17
7	Roope Hintz	DAL	25	C	37	72	49	47	8	18	175
8	Anze Kopitar	LAK	35	C	19	67	5	14	13	164	42
9	Mark Stone	VGK	30	RW	9	30	39	10	210	78	7
10	Tim Stutzle	OTT	20	LW	22	58	3	8	15	61	95
11	Dylan Larkin	DET	26	C	31	69	14	31	111	72	32
12	Phillip Danault	LAK	29	C	27	54	7	11	19	110	48
13	Anthony Cirelli	TBL	25	C	17	43	38	67	50	112	3
14	Jordan Staal	CAR	34	C	17	36	39	56	4	137	211
15	Yanni Gourde	SEA	30	C	21	48	29	22	62	149	12
16	Andrew Copp	DET	28	C	21	53	73	62	97	73	91
17	Vincent Trocheck	NYR	28	C	21	51	36	42	23	56	122
18	Zach Hyman	EDM	30	RW	27	54	218	110	139	32	208
19	Nick Paul	TBL	27	C	16	32	6	27	10	154	59
20	J-G Pageau	NYI	29	C	18	39	19	107	36	159	94

Under Consideration (in alphabetical order): Michael Bunting, Blake Coleman, Sean Couturier (injured), Joel Eriksson Ek, Barclay Goodrow, Ryan Hartman, Kevin Hayes (injured last season), Calle Jarnkrok, Anton Lundell, Ilya Mikheyev, Ryan Nugent-Hopkins.

Naturally, given the catch-all nature of the Clutch archetype, not every player excels in every single category. And given the two-way bent of the Clutch player, they aren’t all monsters in creating individual scoring chances, it’s more often that the work they do leads to scoring chances for teammates. It’s also important to keep in mind: in some of these categories, the only players ranked above them are in the Franchise player bucket.

The data points listed above are also not a be-all, end-all in terms of definition. You know the Clutch player archetype when you see it.

However, a deep dive on the data did reveal a few interesting items. For some players (Mika Zibanejad or Sebastian Aho, for instance), that could’ve gone into a number of different categories, their high league rankings best suited them for this all-around bucket. It also produced a few names we did not expect to see in this category.

When rankings were averaged out, no player had a higher composite league-wide ranking in these categories than Ottawa’s Tim Stutzle. That data point, combined with the fact that he finished last season with 31 points in 27 games and he is the youngest player on the board at age 20, earned him an unexpectedly high Clutch ranking.

One of Stutzle’s former teammates, Nick Paul, was also a surprise addition to the Top 20. He ranked highly in so many categories, which is easy to see why Tampa Bay decided to reward him with a seven-year contract this summer. Perhaps, with Stutzle ready to do some of the dirty work Paul did in Ottawa, that made it easier for the Senators to say goodbye to Paul last season at the trade deadline.

It’s also no surprise that the Lightning have three players inside the Top 20. They’ve been pretty Clutch in their own right.

Up Next: Distributor

Part I: Franchise Players

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