Defender of the Year 2025-26: Three Finalists, Three Different Cases

Defender of the Year is a tough category to boil down to just one metric. “Defender” can be a bit of a misnomer considering the heavy involvement they have on offense, often leading to them being referred to as a Blue-line Player. In fact, our three finalists only lead the league in offensive stats (Goals, Shots, Primary Assists) for the Defender position, with defensive stats like blocked shots being led by players off the short list.

The nominations therefore seem to be based on “Best Player from the Defender position” rather than focusing on raw defensive stats. This post dives into the different ways the players have made an impact for their team from several different perspectives in hopes of finding a clear winner.

The numbers each finalist puts up

As mentioned above, Jaques, Keller, & Winn make up the top 3 for Goals, Shots, and Primary Assists, and all three of them in the same ballpark for Secondary Assists. In the Shot Blocking category, Haley Winn shows as a clear favorite with 45 blocks — ranking 4th in the league.

Play Maker — involvement in scoring sequences

Starting offensive, the Playmaker stat is my attempt at showing player activity that leads to shots/goals for their team. Playmaker extends past the usual point attribution of goal/primary assist/secondary assist to add in blocks, hits, and other events that are part of a continuous scoring sequence. In other words, how often is a player involved when something good happens for their team.

As you can see, these 3 are the clear front-runners by a large margin. This is likely due to their outsized offensive contribution for their team in goals and assists, but those don’t tell the whole story. As shown in the Shot-chains and Scoring-chains column, these players are heavily involved in sequences that lead to scoring chances.

On-ice impact — goal suppression

This next section explores each defender’s goal suppression via the opponent's expected goals per 60 minutes (xG/60). Effectively, how much did the defender’s presence on the ice lower the opponent’s chances of scoring.

I have further separated this out to show the differences between the defender and the rest of their team, as well as the rest of the league. This is in hopes of reducing bias due to one player’s team being stronger overall. It also raises the point, is this award for the most valuable player to her team? Or compared to the league overall? If the former, Sophie Jaques clearly deserves the nod, as the rest of Vancouver’s defense can’t seem to stop anyone without her. If the latter, Keller and Winn are in a dead heat.

Same forwards, three finalists — apples-to-apples

To compare apples-to-apples, here are each defender’s xG differences when facing the top 10 PWHL forwards (by xG). Here is where Haley Winn begins to pull away in defensive presence, with a near even or positive difference in xG when she is on ice compared to the rest of the team. Sophie Jaques falls behind here, being mostly negative or slightly breaking even within her own team. Surprisingly, none of the defenders appear to outperform the league average.

Keller and Winn — a package deal

Throwing a wrench into this comparison is the fact that Keller & Winn play as a pair, making separating out their achievements individually becomes murky at best. Below is a comparison table of how they perform when on ice together, and who has the advantage when out there alone. As you can see, they shine when playing as a pair and are back and forth when playing alone.

The snub

A particular shoutout I would like to make is the snub of Maggie Flaherty. In purely defensive measures she excels, ranking higher than Jaques in Hits and Blocks. The blocks category is particularly impressive, as she is 8 blocks higher than the next closest defender even with Montreal allowing the fewest shots-against in the whole league. She does, however, fall behind the chosen finalists in offensive stats and play-making potential.

Conclusion

With all that said, who deserves Defender of the Year? I have no clue.

Sophie Jaques proves that she is essential to Vancouver’s success. With her on the ice, Vancouver defends demonstrably better with serious opponent xG suppression compared to the rest of her team. Along with that she is heavily involved in setting up plays that lead to scoring opportunities as shown in the Play-maker stat. However, in raw defensive statistics she lags behind Winn by a fair margin, and the xG Diff isn’t even close.

Keller vs. Winn — virtually inseparable

Considering they are almost always on the ice together, it is difficult to separate these two players in a raw numbers analysis. In most stats they are within a single player ranking of each other, they are both very involved in creating scoring plays, and are effectively a toss-up on how well they suppress opposing teams in the few cases where only one of them is on the ice at a time.