EP Rinkside Top-20 Defencemen for the 2023-24 season

Welcome back to our third annual EP Rinkside player rankings, where I go position by position sorting the top-20 players into tiers based on how I expect them to perform in the 2023-24 season. That doesn't mean I'm just sorting by projected wins above replacement (WAR), though. In recognition of the uncertainty of every way of predicting the future in hockey, I prefer to take a more holistic approach in these rankings, considering not only TopDownHockey's WAR model but the manually tracked micro-stats released by Corey Sznajder and of course my own eye test. This should ideally give a more balanced and reasonable list than any one method would alone.

As in the past, I've compiled some of the players' most notable skills in graphics that show how they are projected to rank in each of their t