2023 Player Ratings: Judge the performance of the Bruins defensemen

If you managed to make it through grading all of those forwards yesterday, you’re in luck — the defense corps is considerably smaller!

As is the case with all of these ratings, it’s hard to separate the regular season from the playoffs.

That’s kind of the point, as it’d be silly to do a “rate the players” on a one-round playoff run; instead, we want to encourage looking at the whole picture.

Of all the groups we’ll rate, the defensemen are likely to be the ones most affected by the early playoff exit.

While the goaltending performance softened a bit and some forwards disappeared, the play of the B’s blueliners was probably the most glaring issue over the course of the Florida series.

The normally buttoned-up unit was a mess for most of the series: brutal turnovers, poor decisions with the puck, and forced passes dominated the series.

Some credit for that has to be given to Florida’s approach, but the B’s defensemen didn’t exactly distinguish themselves in that series.

Still, there were plenty of highs.

Charlie McAvoy continued to solidify himself as one of the league’s premier young defensemen. Hampus Lindholm made his contract extension look like a genius move.

There were some not-so-highs too, whether it was the uneven play of Matt Grzelcyk or the puzzling turnovers of Connor Clifton.

Remember: look at it as a season-long body of work. That will help some guys, but certainly hurt others.

Rate the 2022-2023 performances of the Bruins’ defensemen