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Displaying pretext
I used to evaluate a defenseman's defensive abilities by how few shots or goals were directed against his net while he was on the ice, relative to his teammates. It's become quite obvious over time how unreliable this approach is, because it ignores the quality of competition.
The best defensemen in the league face the toughest opponents, and it doesn't matter who you are, Sidney Crosby and Alexander Ovechkin are going to get more shots and goals than Craig Adams and Boyd Gordon. In fact, for just that reason, the best defensive blueliners will actually allow more shots and goals than the ones facing Adams and Gordon.
To demonstrate, we'll use Gabe Desjardins' Corsi-based Quality of Competition data over the last three seasons. There are 605 player-seasons of defensemen who played at least 40 games, and we'll define two groups, those facing the easiest competition and those facing the toughest.
The Sheltered Group
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2 comments have been left for this article. 
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Great explanation Rob. Defensemen appear to suffer more effect from QoC than forwards do. Has anyone ever split that out?
As for comparison, I think it would be fair to take all the d-men more than 1 std dev higher than the mean on RCQoC and then compare their Corsi and Zone starts to each other. At least that way we know they're all top-pairing guys being compared to one another.
Thanks Ryan. No, I haven't looked that carefully at forwards. QoC seems more useful with defensemen, since they're more likely to get matched up against top defensive forwards, and shoulder more of the responsibility in shutting them down.
Great point about zone starts. It tends to have a close relationship with QoC, we should determine exactly how close.