Every year, I put together a little breakdown of which defencemen have excelled in their own end, calling it the "Rod Langway Award" for a fictional NHL trophy dedicated to the league's top defensive defencemen. Marc Staal finished at the top of this list last season.

Using some of the advanced stats at Gabe Desjardins' terrific Behind The Net site, I rank every defenceman who plays in defensive situations by the quality of players they face (QCMP) and how many goals they are on the ice for at even strength and while shorthanded.

It's certainly not a perfect method, but it does give us a decent idea of which defensive defencemen are doing a good job of keeping the puck out of their net against good players.

Here are the results at midseason:

Honourable mentions: Tyler Myers, Jeff Schultz, Barret Jackman, Doug Murray

Two notes on this list: If a player is paired with another player almost exclusively, it's difficult to separate them statistically, so you do see defence pairings make appearances on the list often. The other thing is players on teams with either really good or really poor goaltending will have their numbers affected by that.

I'll be putting together a similar list for defensive forwards in the next day or two.