Why are offensive players bad on defense?

A theory about the Carolina Hurricanes' odd start

If you’ve been around hockey long enough, you’d heard the cliché about how skill players are less defensively capable than their colleagues of the dump it in, grind it out variety.

When I began working in hockey full-time in 2013, I met a number of researchers in the public sphere who disagreed with conventional wisdom. Indeed they empirically found that…