What Will the Maple Leafs Miss About Simon Benoit?

Every hockey team has players who get noticed because they score goals. And then there are the players you notice mostly when they're gone. I think Simon Benoit might be one of those players for the Maple Leafs.

Benoit wasn't going to show up on the scoresheet very often. In 73 games, he had no goals and six assists. His plus-minus was minus-22. If you looked at those numbers without knowing how he was used, you might wonder why anybody would miss him.

But that's not really how Benoit's job worked. He was there to do the dirty work. Benoit played the kind of minutes that aren't particularly glamorous. He started a lot of shifts in his own zone, blocked shots, threw his body around and spent significant time killing penalties. He had 194 hits and 114 blocked shots.

That's a lot of getting in the way of hockey pucks and hockey players.

Benoit Took the Minutes Nobody Wanted.

This is one of those places where I think hockey statistics can tell you something without telling you everything. A defenceman who spends much of his night starting in the defensive zone is going to have a different-looking stat sheet than a player who starts most of his shifts in the offensive zone.

Benoit wasn't being asked to drive the offence. He was being asked to survive. And sometimes surviving is the job. Roman Polak was another good example of this kind of player during his career. Big, physical, willing to block shots, willing to kill penalties and perfectly happy to spend an evening defending rather than creating. Those players aren't necessarily fun to watch every night. But coaches tend to like having them.

Someone Has to Do the Dirty Work.

That's what Toronto could miss this season. When you take a player like Benoit out of the lineup, you don't just lose six assists. You lose somebody who was willing to absorb some of those hard minutes. Somebody else has to block the shot. Somebody else has to take the defensive-zone draw and then spend 30 seconds trying to get the puck out. And somebody else has to stand in front of the net when the other team is loading up on the power play.

Maybe the Maple Leafs have somebody else who can do it. That's what John Chayka and the new coaching staff have to figure out. But it isn't automatically easy to replace. And that's why I think Benoit's departure could be felt in Toronto in a way that won't show up in the standings or the individual statistics.

The players who do the dirty work rarely get much credit when everything is going well. You notice them when they're gone. And maybe that's exactly what happens with Simon Benoit.