Summing up David Reinbacher's 23-24 season
Far from ideal but individual play progressed still
Note: This article was written without knowing if Kloten will have to play a play-out series against Ajoie starting March 16th. So Reinbacher’s days in Kloten might be over, or might last a best of 7 play-out series AND (if Kloten loses AND Olten wins the Swiss league) a best of 7 relegation promotion series.
Let’s clear the air before we get going. This was a mess of a season, and no one could have foreseen it.
The changes of coaches, the bad performances, weird tactics on the ice are obviously NOT the usual thing in Europe. Teams change coaches as much as in the NHL, or even less, as long as the results are okay.
The coming and going of teammates is also not the norm. Top European leagues do not see roster movements like the AHL or ECHL. They recall players from lower leagues when they have injuries and maybe make a couple of signings during the season to boost the team before the playoffs.
The mess Reinbacher was in this year is a 2023-2024 Kloten mess.
Kloten finished 13th in NL, with 52 points, as far away from the 12th spot than from the 14th, owned by small budget Ajoie.
Kloten was 22 points away from the 10th spot qualifying for the play-in round. 21 points below their 22-23 performance that had seen them finish 9th in the league.
If we are looking at responsibilities, Kloten’s GM Larry Mitchell, appointed last year, is responsible of hiring the coaches, and coaching himself at some point.
Gerry Fleming, named this summer and who was coaching at the opening of the season, is responsible for turning a fairly interesting 22-23 team into a very bad one, including making them defend man on man all over the defensive zone.
The Montreal Canadiens trusted Gerry Flemming because some of the staff knew him personally, but did they ask what was his game plan like? Habs could have expressed reserves against a full man on man strategy.
Add the injurieS (capital s) Reinbacher sustained from the get-go, yeah, lots of things went wrong, none that are Reinbacher’s fault or Switzerland’s fault. Fellow Austrian and Habs prospect Vinzenz Rohrer took a big step up in his development in Zürich this season.
That being said, things are what they are and the season has passed.
We have tracked all of David Reinbacher’s 35 games this season as part of the 339 done at NL Ice Data in our coverage of the Swiss National League. Time to look at what we saw and learned.
Time on Ice?
With just over 19 minutes per game, Reinbacher ended a few seconds above his 22-23 stats, and was still the most used defenseman in Kloten at 5v5 and overall.
Like last season, he did not see any penalty-kill minutes. Why not? We have to understand that teams are dressing up 20 players in Switzerland, and Kloten this season very often used a 12 forwards - 8 defensemen line-up. With some many defensemen, the multiple coaching staffs judged they had enough defensive specialists to be used on the PK to allocate Reinbacher’s minutes elsewhere.
His PP time clocked at 1m45 per game, down from 1m58 last year. Like for the PK, Kloten had enough defensemen to use offensive specialists on the first power-play wave, namely import players Lucas Ekestahl-Jonsson (then he left), then Nathan Beaulieu (then he left), then Swiss loaned Mika Henauer (then he left), new arrival Dario Sidler or veteran Leandro Profico. If the last sentence sounds like a mess, it sums up Kloten’s season a lot, and the constant variable here was Reinbacher’s handling the PP2 wave.
Production and Impact
With only 11 points in 35 games, Reinbacher’s production has dropped this season, from 0.48 points per game to 0.31. Now let’s keep in mind Kloten had the absolute worst 5v5 offense this season in NL with 1.61 goal scored per 60 minutes, when the league average is around 2.2. They also had the worst offense last year but at 1.88 goal per 60. With over 2,500 minutes played at 5v5 over a season, that’s 12 goals difference if you are scoring at a 1.61 per 60 rate versus 1.88.
Kloten’s defense remained 13th in NL but allowed more goals than last season as well.
And Reinbacher enjoyed (that’s a joke) a brutal 94.3 PDO while on this ice this season, one of the worst PDO in NL…
These facts are no excuses, but it puts a lot of context explaining the drop in production and what should have been around a -3 goals differential at 5v5, based on xG for and against, became a -15… A first time in the negative waters for him in his career.
All of Kloten’s top line and top pair (Reinbacher and Steve Kellenberger) ended under -15. Poor Kellenberger being at -32.
Offense
But putting things into perspective, Reinbacher’s year was not too bad.
Reinbacher took more shots per 60 minutes this season, creating a bit more xG as well. But when he had scored 2 goals for 2.07 xG last year, he never found the back of the net at 5v5 despite also racking up 2.04 xG of chances.
We saw him venture away from his right point more than before, offering himself as a backdoor option and diving at the top of the circles.
He also racked up more Shot assists per 60, but completed less high-danger passes toward the homeplate, something Kloten simply did not try a lot this season.
On transition, he remained a top-20 percentile in the league for his ability to make Controlled Exits, and one of the best for executing exits leading to a shot for Kloten, something very encouraging. We saw him starting the offense then supporting the rush as often as he could, or trying many stretch passes directly reaching the offensive blue line.
As a consequence, he reached the 66th percentile for Controlled Entries, something that was missing from his game last year.
Overall, his impact on transitioning the puck, making plays and taking shots increased his xG Contribution and he ranked at the 77th percentile among defensemen in NL for his impact on his own team’s offense.
Entries denial
His defense against the rush and his gap control were very good last year for an 18 years old. But he clearly had to adjust to his reportedly bigger size and weight in terms of skating this fall. Added to his early knee injury, it took him a few months to get back on track.
In the end, we saw a much better control of his stops and gos, changing direction and gears. Not overcommitting and using his stick length instead.
Speaking of which, stick work has become a unique tool given his gigantic reach. Though he also tends to believe it will be enough in every situations, and can get surprised by a last second skating effort from the forward, beating his checking attempt, including sometimes on entries.
On the sequence above, we see him reach out to break an entry despite being quite far away from the puck carrier. The attack continues but he then prevents a rebound shot with his stick and body strength, before pursuing his opponent and handling him with physical pressure. Then calmly passing the puck.
Board battles
Here again, Reinbacher had to adjust his skating and balance but we were able to see the real him this winter and he is now able to use his physical force in puck battles.
He's a big fan of using one of his legs to pin down his opponent while having both his arms and stick free, which is very good thinking. Despite being larger and bigger than almost everybody else, he is not overusing it once he has pinned down his opponent. He only took 18 minutes of penalties this year, a 0.5 per game ratio a bit under in 22-23 stat.
Poise was already a strength of his last season, which was ridiculously mature for an 18 years old playing so many minutes in NL. Coming back from Montreal in the fall, Reinbacher looked like (and admitted it to Arpon Basu from The Athletic later on) he felt he had to carry the team on his shoulders and was overdoing everything he was attempting. He managed to take a step back this winter but has now looked a but “too cool” to my personal linking. Is it the team situation? It will be very interesting to see him stepping foot in a new environment this spring with a renewed energy.
The man on man defense played by Kloten most of the season hurt him a lot. On countless occasions, Reinbacher followed his man up in the zone, but then was not sure what to do as a defenseman, rush back to his net, or keep trailing his guy. Trailing a guy also means losing him in the traffic, bumping into teammates, etc. A nightmare on European ice, where the extra width makes all the difference.
In Montreal, Reinbacher will have to defend man on man but only low in his zone, where it’s the norm everywhere. Otherwise, Martin St Louis has been using a box positioning.
We were expecting to see him work on his offense this season, which he did, but not to experience struggles defensively. However, if we need to repeat this one more time, the collective situation had a big impact on that and a fresh new assessment will need to be done after a few months in North-America.
What does it mean for his future?
Obviously, from a purely statistical perspective, his low scoring and goals allowing season impacted his profile. We already saw earlier that he went from a 19 NHLe equivalent to 13.
If was staying his whole career in NL, he moved from being qualify as 100% “too good for this league” to “Elite”. Which is still not bad at all, just not as mind blowing as last year.
Projecting him in the NHL, his average season in Montreal would now look like a 35 points, down from 47 last summer. However, this still projects him as a Top pair defenseman throughout his career.
No reason to panic then.
Final Thoughts
There is no other way to treat this season other than a disappointment. Not in a bad or a mean way, but disappointing compared to what it could have been.
A prospect playing pro hockey right after his draft season AND playing a major role is very rare. The best NHL prospects in the SHL, KHL or Liiga are often borderline top-6/top-4 but never have the biggest Time on ice and responsibilities Reinbacher had last season and this one in Kloten. The disappointment is that it did not lead to anything significant for his development.
His season was troubled by playing an inadequate system, leading to losses, confusion, drop in confidence, etc. A simple but hurtful thing is that Kloten did not play meaningful games this season, or barely. There maybe was one surge in their feeling of urgency in December that lasted an handful of games, but we are not talking playoffs race meaningful, even less post-season hockey. Kloten was supposed to fight for maybe the 9-10th spots, qualifying for the play-in round, that were in play till the last day.
The lack of wins also mean Reinbacher did not have the occasion to be on the ice defending a lead late in games, something his role would have led him to manage a lot. When Kloten was close enough to chase the score late in games, Kloten was sending their offensive defensemen first, again forbidding Reinbacher to play the most intense minutes.
The attraction of playing in Switzerland again, the top league in Europe with the Swedish SHL, was all about the quality of the competition he was gonna face every night, like last season. But, it now feels that something was missing, and it was the quality of his teammates on the ice. It is by no mean an attack on Kloten’s players but the next big step for Reinbacher will be to play offensively at top AHL, then NHL speed, with guys owning the according passing and shooting skills. Something the top half of NL teams have, but Kloten barely possessed this season.
It could have been a year where Reinbacher used his built-up confidence to work on his skills and try things offensively, but collective mess and injuries set him back instead.
At least, he had time to digest the post-draft hype, realizing he does not have to save the world on his own, and find his way one step at a time.
Right now the most important is to begin a new chapter of his career, in Laval or at the Worlds. He will surely need a period of adaptation, but his character will also help him enjoy this fresh start to make the best of it. Then re-assess over the summer, settle, heal and fully get in Montreal mode.