Rookie Coach,

Thanks for the kudos.

Regarding your question: How capable are your D regarding gap control? Where are their shortcomings? They must be able to play a 1 v 1 extremely well before you progress to a 2 v 1 (with or without a backchecker). In my skill academies, I spend an inordinate amount of time on the 1 v 1 for the first month or two to create a solid base. Then, I move into 2 v 2 for a month then 3 v 3 for a month. I work odd man rushes afterwards.

I don't know the age, level or league of your team, so this is a general answer. In a team setting you must take into account which forecheck you use as this will influence your backcheck. If you look at Tom's book, page 250, Card 238, this is a transition game where the defending team gets support from the backcheckers. Page 252, Card 241, is the ultimate transition game and can be set up to your needs (odd man rush).

I would certainly use accountability at all times! Have two colours and keep score - a coach watching each end. Score being how successful the D is at breaking up the rush... points awarded for no shot off the rush; no second scoring chance; backchecker getting back by a certain place (ringette line?) or before a shot is taken; breaking out or clearing the zone. Offensively: points scored for a shot on net off the rush; a secondary scoring chance; a goal scored, etc. You determine the scenario and points awarded. Divide into two teams and compete.

Hope this helps. Good luck!

Rookie Coach - Tom and Dean have many more ideas than I do, but I thought I'd mention one thing......When I was a player, I really didn't understand good gap control until someone made me follow the play out of the zone ("seal the zone") as closely as possible. Is it possible your D are not doing this? One game modification that focuses on this is to require all players to be over the offensive blue line before a goal can be scored. Your forwards will let your D know pretty quickly if they are being lazy! Your D will also find themselves more involved in the offense, which is a big plus.

Hope this helps,
Dave
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Dave, your suggestions are just as valid as mine or Dean's or anyones are. There are no guarantees any of the ideas will work. they are just our opinions based on our experience. So keep giving your ideas and I hope other coaches do the same.

Tom , Dean and Dave ,

Thanks for all the information you guys post . I read all the posts daily.
Dean I will check out those pages in Tom's 2 nd book ( Hockey Coaching ABC's) again. As you told me once before you went over the book many times picking up new information.
Tom - Great post also. Yes I have gone over those D-100 Transition games a number of times. I think I have most of them memorized by now. But you don't do a game or a drill just to fill time. The coach must have an understanding of the game before he passes it on to the players at practise. I have watched a number of coaches try an figure out a game or drill when they get on the ice. Also it's the little parts such as accountability as Dean says that can really add the learning part. Keeps players from just going through the motions making the same mistakes.
Dave you have a great insight into the game also. Keep up the good work.

While I currently don't coach a team as head coach , I get asked to help run practise's for different age groups. Last year I helped with three separate teams and age groups. I seem to be asking a number questions on these posts ,( hope you guys don't mind) but I want a different type or add a new look to my practise's. I like to be totally prepared when I hit the ice. The one thing I do know is the players pick up on how well a coach is prepared for each practise very quickly.

I have been running practise's for 20 years now the old traditional way. But I seen to be cracking the past few years , adding more games etc. I wil;l get there sometime Dean.
I ask some questions that all coaches can get the answer too. Where else can you ask questions and get friendly professional advice from. Coaches helping coaches only in the long run helps players.
I am still learning new things as a coach everyday .
Thanks
RookieCoach

Why hockey is the smartest game in the world:
And how a good mind can turn the game upside down

by Adam Gopnik in MacLeans Magazine, Tuesday, September 27, 2011

***EXCERPT***

It seems to me there are two things that make hockey the greatest of all games. One is rooted in what it gives to the players and the other in what it gives to its fans. For the player—and for us as vicarious players—it offers the finest theatre in the world to display the power of spatial intelligence and situational awareness. “Spatial intelligence” is a term that the Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner was the first to popularize. His point was that body is inseparable from mind, attitude from analysis, and that there are many kinds of smartness. There is the familiar IQ-test analytic intelligence, but there are also emotional intelligence, social intelligence and spatial intelligence: the ability to grasp a changing whole and anticipate its next stage. It’s the ability to make quick decisions, to size up all the relationships in a fast-changing array and understand them. A related notion is that of situational awareness: a heightened consciousness of your surroundings and both the intentions of the people around you and their anticipated actions.

Well, hockey, obviously, which is played at incredibly high speed, reveals and rewards situational and spatial intelligence at a degree of difficulty that no other sport possesses. So much so that the greatest of all hockey players, Wayne Gretzky, had, besides his other significant skill as a fine-edge skater, almost nothing else that he was specifically good at. That’s his gift—the gift of spatial and situational intelligence: knowing what’s going to happen in three seconds, anticipating the pattern approaching by seeing the pattern now, sussing out the goalie’s next decision and Jari Kurri’s or Luc Robitaille’s eventual trajectory in what would be a single glance if a glance were even taken. Gretzky is the extreme expression of the common skill the game demands.

To watch him behind the net was to see stasis rooted in smarts. I recall games (one in particular, late in his career, against the Canadiens stands out; you can still find it on YouTube) in which he would position himself there, waiting for the other team to make a move. If you went after him he would put the puck perfectly on the stick of the open man. If you left him there he would wait, and perhaps try a wraparound or find a free winger as the patterns of the power play wove and unwove in front of him. It depended on supreme skill held in tactful abeyance—and it was a demonstration that he also scores who only stands and waits.

Anyone who has kids who play hockey knows the phenomenon: there are big, strong kids and smaller, weaker kids—and then there is always one kid who “sees the ice,” who, in the midst of all the flubbed passes and scraped shins and sudden falls, grasps where the play is going next. Hockey is the one game in which, as a hockey-playing savant of my acquaintance says, a good mind can turn a game upside down.

In no other sport can a quality of mind so dominate as in the supposedly brutal game of ice hockey. Hockey is the one game where an intelligence can completely overthrow expectations. (When Gretzky recognized his successor in the still-adolescent Sidney Crosby, it was exactly that quality he was recognizing: not athleticism, but insight.) Yes, no doubt soccer rewards similar skills. A Johan Cruyff or an Eric Cantona has similar situational awareness and spatial intelligence, while we grow disgusted with superior players—like the shoulda-been-great Brazilian Ronaldo—who lack it; but there are 11 men on a soccer pitch and maybe two goals in a game, and the whole thing, despite the sporadic show of “pace,” proceeds at a walk, sometimes accelerating to a jog.

All sports entertain us in part because of the thrill of watching a great athlete do what we can’t, even if what he or she’s doing is in part a mental exercise. Our empathetic engagement—what a close female friend of mine (whose great-uncle is actually in the Hockey Hall of Fame) calls “pitiful vicarious identification” or “the sad armchair act of pretending you’re doing what you’re actually watching”—with the players is key. But sports also entertain us as forms of drama. We get engaged, even in the absence of a single great player or performance, with the way the game tells a thrilling and unpredictable narrative woven by 10 or 20 players at once. A great game is a great show, and it’s also a great story. What makes those stories great is when they’re unpredictable but not unjust—uncharted enough that there’s no certainty of the result but organized enough that the result does not seem to be pure chance.

I think by now most of us have heard, however vaguely, something about the branch of mathematics called game theory. It’s a way of understanding competitions that began with the great mathematician John von Neumann at the end of the 1940s and has since spread and conquered the world, or at least many academic disciplines, particularly economics and some of the more hard-ass parts of political science. Game theory attempts to mathematically capture behaviour in strategic situations, games, in which an individual’s success in making choices depends on the choices of others. Anyone who has seen the movie A Beautiful Mind knows about John Nash and his equilibrium, and the more general notion that you can understand many social phenomena in the world if you see them as simple games rooted in guessing and outguessing your opponent’s plans.

The funny thing about game theory is that, though it has been used to explain everything from economics to nuclear warfare, it’s very rarely used to explain games—or at least not sports. And yet when you think about it, part of the pleasure we take in sports has everything to do with game theory, which has exactly to do with questions of how much we know, how much our opponents know, how much they know of what we know, and so on.

I am far too innumerate to even attempt a rigorous analysis of this sort, but I do think it can be enlightening to play with a few of its key concepts. One concept opposes open-information (or perfect-information) games against ones with closed, or imperfect, information. Chess is probably the most famous instance of an open-information game. When you’re playing chess, you have all the information the other player has; nothing is concealed from you, and so there are truly never any surprises in the strategic sense. There are no hidden rooks. On the other hand, old-fashioned five-card draw poker is a completely hidden or closed-information game. You don’t know what’s in your opponent’s hand, so you have to guess on the basis of their behaviour and your knowledge of their past playing patterns what they might be holding in their hand right now. It’s a game of deduced intention but also of inferred information. The best games—the games that people seem to enjoy most—offer some kind of equilibrium between a small sum of hidden information and a larger sum of open information held in tension. In Texas Hold ’em, the most popular of poker games, there are five shared cards—a lot of open information—and a crucial two cards’ worth of closed information.

Team sports, which are both athletic contests and strategic ones, can be ranked along the same dimensions. Basketball, for instance, in some ways comes closest to being an open-information sport. Plays are limited, surprises are unimportant—no one basket is so significant that it is worth over-planning to achieve it, and even if you could, it wouldn’t matter that much. What matters are trends, tendencies and small tactical victories—real strategic surprise is relatively limited. The great basketball coach Phil Jackson ran his famous triangle offence with the Lakers, and with the Bulls before them. It requires tactical discipline, but the other team always knows what he’s doing; it’s a question of whether they can do it more efficiently and consistently than you can defence it. (The key event in basketball, foul shooting, is purely mechanical, and a matter, not trivial, of consistency alone.)

Pro football, on the other hand, is a good example of something closer to a closed-information sport: you have a series of particular strategic plans that you invent in secret and that you then spring on your opponent. That’s why football rewards coaches like the great Bill Walsh, whose genius was not for tactical stability but for strategic innovation and surprise—half the playing time is actually spent watching people plan in secret. In the ’89 Super Bowl, Walsh pulled a single play, designed to freeze a Bengals linebacker, from his script for a winning touchdown. That he had a script is proof of the partly closed nature of the game. And baseball is more like Hold ’em poker: everything’s evident except the hole card of the pitch that’s about to be thrown.

Now, hockey looks, when you watch it with an unpractised eye, like an open-information sport. It looks like wild improvisation with no strategic plan underneath—a series of instinctive reactions to bouncing pucks and sliding players. (When people say they can’t see the puck, I think what they really mean is that they can see it but they just can’t see its point, its purpose in travelling. The game appears to be simply a brutal series of random collisions in which the invisible puck somehow sporadically ends up in the net.) But the more closely you observe the game, the more you see that it’s kind of the Texas Hold ’em of the world’s spectator sports: there’s a great deal that’s open, but crucial elements are buried or cloaked and are revealed only afterwards to the eye of experience and deeper knowledge. There are hole cards in hockey, and some of the fun of being a fan is learning to look for them.

Some of this is plain in the inordinate effect a man with a plan can have on a hockey team; the defensive system that Jacques Lemaire installed with the Devils could take a mediocre team and make it into a champion. The trap, or shell, is tedious but it’s wonderfully effective, and unlike the triangle offence it’s hidden, in the sense that it takes place so quickly, and demands so many rapid adjustments, that I have found even experienced hockey fans have a hard time describing the way it works. The tension between the obvious givens and hidden hole cards is true as well at a more granular level of the game.

Just think about the difference between taking a penalty in soccer and the shootout in hockey. The penalty in soccer is something that academic game theorists have actually looked at in detail: what’s the best technique, they ask, the optimal strategy for the shooter in soccer to pursue when he’s got a penalty shot to take? It’s a play of minds, because the goalkeeper has to anticipate what the shooter will do, and the shooter, the goalkeeper. Shoot left? Shoot right? High? Low? And the theorists have discovered that the optimal strategy is . . . just to blast away. The goal is so big and the goalkeeper so small that the shooter is much better off just blasting to the middle rather than trying to pick a corner.

So, predictably, the optimal strategy for the goalkeeper in the soccer shootout is just to stay in place, not dive to either corner—though it’s very hard for a goalkeeper to summon the discipline to do that. And so you have this situation in soccer where basically any kind of strategic planning doesn’t pay. In the shootout in hockey, you have exactly the same confrontation between shooter and goalkeeper, but the shooter just blasting away or the goalie staying in place is never going to work. There are just too many dimensions in play—the shot takes place in depth and in motion, not from a fixed spot—and the odds between goalie and shooter are too closely matched. The shootout in hockey puts a premium on having a hole card: an idea, a strategy, a plan in advance, unknown to the opposition. And the goalie needs to respond to that kind of strategic initiative, that kind of creativity, with aggressive anticipation. The obvious play, which benefits you in a sport such as soccer, penalizes you in hockey.

Though it may seem as if the great goals in hockey history were chance events, stray moments seized by opportunistic players, the truth is that as you understand the sport more deeply you can see that there is a kind of hidden strategic reservoir, almost a morality play, a history, behind every great goal in the game. When I think about the great goals that have been scored in hockey, the famous goals in my own lifetime, I see an element of historical pattern and strategic consequence in each of them. I think, for instance, of probably the most famous goal in my own fanship, the goal that Guy Lafleur scored in 1979 in the famous “too many men on the ice” game, the Montreal Canadiens and the Boston Bruins in the seventh game of the Stanley Cup semifinals. What’s remarkable about that goal, if you watch it now, is not only that Lafleur takes a terrific shot but also how much else is going on around it, pointing toward past and future alike. Seeing it now, we’re stunned by the sheer incompetence of Gilles Gilbert, the Boston goalie, who is playing a stand-up-and-kick style that now looks antediluvian—a very old-fashioned kind of upright goaltending whose futility, so evident on this shot, would make it extinct within a decade. The shot invalidates a style, not just a moment.

But one also notices that the man actually carrying the puck is Jacques Lemaire, Lafleur’s centre, and that Lemaire draws the defence toward him before he makes a quiet drop pass to set up the shot. Now, Lemaire was only promoted to the top line after an up-and-down career as a one-dimensional player, famous for his heavy shot. (He in effect won the Stanley Cup eight years before, by taking a more or less random shot from centre ice that happened to stun and elude the Chicago Blackhawks goalie Tony Esposito.) But in this case Lemaire doesn’t take the shot, and we’re reminded that Lemaire was schooled for five years by Scotty Bowman, the Canadiens coach, who patiently transformed him from an offensive-minded player into a defensive-minded player, first demoting him to the second line, then eventually putting him back on the first line after he understood the virtues of an all-over game. And it’s Lemaire, as we’ve seen, who then takes Bowman’s regimen and, in his years with the dull but effective New Jersey Devils, turns it into the modern trap, an ice-clogging reactive defensive game plan that demands more self-discipline than style. So the pass, in a sense, is more potent than the goal. What Lemaire has learned matters as much as what Lafleur has done—a whole history compressed into a back pass and a shot.

Part of the joy of understanding the game is being able to read it well enough to spot when those pivotal moments take place. The fine hockey writer Michael Farber has analyzed Sidney Crosby’s goal in the most recent Olympics in that spirit: six seconds that subsume 20 years. One could do the same with Mario Lemieux’s great goal in the ’87 Canada Cup—seeing, for instance, how in that goal Gretzky identified himself as primarily a playmaker, not a scorer—but it’s enough to say for now that each of these goals is the result of a plan and history unknown to or beyond the control of the opposition, shared among the players through their common spatial intelligence, each taking place at such high speed that the plan is invisible to all but the tutored eye. Each is crucially significant to the outcome of the contest but is not the only such moment in the contest, and each has long-term consequences for the way the sport evolves.

Hockey approaches a more perfect balance between planning and reading, idea and improvisation, than any other sport. Runs in baseball are information; in basketball, baskets are events; in soccer, goals are exclamations. But goals in hockey are punctuation—they end sentences that can be traced through phrases to make long chains of meaning. And so great goals, like great aphorisms, repay any amount of after-the-fact analysis. How did so much get packed into one phrase, or play? Ice hockey looks like a reflex, rapture sport but is really a rational, reasoned one. Spotting the patterns amid the quick plunges is part of the fun. I often go to sleep at night running through great goals I have seen—there is a weighting toward the seventies Habs, but only because they were the greatest team of all time, not because I was a teenager then—and what astonishes me is that, no matter how often you rewind them, they still play back beautifully, and in your mind’s eye (or on the YouTube screen) you always see more. Hockey offers drama at first viewing, meaning on the second, and learning on the third and fourth, even 40 years on. The tradition that began a hundred years ago in Montreal—when the English university idea of “rugby on ice” met the evolving French-Canadian idea of a high-skilled performance—of a game that combined the collisions of rugby with the beauty of ice-skating, has, if only for a moment, been realized, and it lingers in your head.

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This article, although 'flowery', speaks to the importance of understanding the game - Game Intelligence.

Quote by: RookieCoach

HockeyGod ,

I would agree with your comments about how practise's are run these days. Last year with Atom age kids , I added games with accountability , and it was surprising how the level of play in that game picked up.

I ran a practise for a Bantam age group on the weekend , and during the game that I was running I over heard one of the players saying , " i love this game , this is fun " . The winning team cheered as the other team did lap at the end and picked up the pucks.

But here is my question for you and Tom .

Say you have a team that is weak backchecking. Always getting out numbered at your blue line and D are backing in too far as a result. This is happening time and time again.

So for a 50 min practise how would you correct this using the ABC method ?

What kind of games would you use.?

Or would you use drills with accountability to reinforce your theme of the practice.?

Most coaches would do drills with no accountability I'm sure. Players might get yelled at if they don't pick up their man , but that would be as far as it goes.

Teaching the game with games is something most coaches don't understand , as you stated in post post earlier. But I think most coaches would;d be open to giving it a try if they understood how it works.

Keep up the great posts , I'm sure yourself and Tom are getting many coaches to at least thing about an different form of teaching the game.

Thanks
RookieCoach

RookieCoach,

In addition to the previous comments we made about this post, Tom posted this drill today... would be worth a look as you wanted some backchecking stuff... this is a 2 vs 2 with 2 extra people applying backpressure. Let me know if it helps!

http://www.hockeycoachingabcs.com/forum/getattachment.php?id=866

Rookie Coach, the transition games have a lot of advantages and they are not understood by many coaches and I hardly ever see them used. Even in Austria where I coached with elite coaches from every major hockey nation I saw very few transition games. they were still stuck in the whistle and drills Pavlov era. (I just heard a bell and can't figure out why I am salivating)

- players change on the go and there are no whistles; so the coach is free to coach and not be a traffic cop.
- you can vary the number of players joining the play which creates any numerical situation you want the players to work on. Talk to them when they return to the line-up about their decisions in that situation.
- add variations such as dump-ins or regroups to replicate real game situations.
- transition games can be played in any area; one zone, cross ice, half the rink, 2/3 of the rink etc.
- you can vary between passive support, active support or some players active and some players passive when they join the play.
- both offense and defense can get support.
- another benefit is that the transition games are so intense that you DON'T NEED TO DO CONDITIONING SKATING; your players will be doing GAMELIKE SKATING at high intensity which is much better than skating in directions you don't skate in games (straight up and back, stop and starting, around nets)
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In the DT400 (game on one goal with extra players waiting for their turn) you can vary the number of supporting players from 1-to 3. If you have passive support from 3 players then everyone works on the 3 on 3 attack, cycle and low dzone coverage.

In the DT400 2-2 game with back pressure that I posted yesterday the closest supporting player gives back pressure on the puck carrier and pushes him/her into the defender in a defensive 2-1. My team always back pressures and that player stays low in the zone; so it is a great way to practice this skill and also forces the attackers to go to the net quickly or they won't have a play.

In the DT400 2-2 with a regroup everyone learns how to hinge and the regrouping attackers must give wall and middle support. The defenders must gap up and take away ice. These are all things that are important habits especially if you want your team to play TOTAL HOCKEY like we are attempting to do.

Next practice we will do a DT100 (full ice with new players rotating in) transition game with the defenders getting passive support from the point, i.e. the defenders will just keep the puck in and defend vs the original defensive players who will attack the other way. This will have everyone practice a full ice 2 on 2 and low zone play. I will then add that the 2 players at the point are actice, i.e. you can pass to them as jokers, they can shoot or pass right away but can't go in. This causes the 2 low attackers to get open for a pass and tip, screen, rebound, while the defenders must stay dside and cover one each, box out, seal sticks to the outside and breakout. You can vary the number of supporting players as well.

I belive that transition games are the logical progression from situation drills and require a lot more GAME INTELLIGENCE. Many times we play a certain situation to something like 3 goals and then change the amount of players supporting.

All's good RookieCoach... not really a thread hijack... just trying to help a fellow coach - to help enable smarter coaches and in turn, smarter players; which is the goal of Game Intelligence!

The Colombian and I had a solid 2.5 hour meeting today with one of the top superintendent's in the Catholic School Board. This fellow is in charge of the Hockey Canada Skills Academy hockey program in all 14 schools that host it.

We explained our philosophy and approach, and look forward to further discussions on improving the state of the game in the local schools... should prove interesting!

Dave I have searched the site and my files and can't find it. It was about the transition between the 4 game playing roles. I did find two really good presentations. One by Erkka Westerlund who coached the silver medal Finns in 2006 and one by Perry Pearn on Dzon play. He was the sacrificial lamb for Montreal yesterday and got gassed because the players weren't scoring on the pp. I will attach them again here.

That's the one......Thanks Kai!

Paulie, I hear your frustration! This has happened to us all... hopefully you know about the autosave function on Word?

Good stuff here. You are hitting the points surrounding the four principles of offence and defence:

O
TRANSITION
PUCK CONTROL
SUPPORT
PRESSURE

D
TRANSITION
STALL / CONTAIN
SUPPORT
PRESSURE

My order differs from Coach Nielson - below... I believe everything starts with Transition!

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Team Play Principles

Offensive Zone Play

The objective of offensive team play is to move the puck as quickly as possible toward the opponents net to attempt to score a goal. Hockey Canada outlines 4 basic principles to achieve this objective:

Principle # 1 Pressure
Principle # 2 Puck Control
Principle # 3 Support
Principle # 4 Transition

Principle # 1 Pressure

The principle of pressure means that all offensive team play is based on quick player or puck movement that forces the defender to react more quickly than they would like. It creates TIME & SPACE for the attacker.

Pressure is accomplished by:

a) Speed: a quickness to attack that will limit the reaction time of the defender and force defensive error.

b) Concentration of Attack: any action or movement in a confined area which creates an offensive numerical advantage.

Principle # 2 Puck Control

A team which is able to maintain possession of the puck will be able to create scoring opportunities.

Puck Protection is accomplished by:

a) Puck Protection: any action or movement that keeps the puck from the defender through the use of one’s body. (Example, driving to the net)

b) Individual Skills: the individual who develops quick skating strides, acceleration with the puck, drive skating, sculling, crossing over to cut in, and cutting to the net, will contribute to a teams ability to execute puck control.

Principle # 3 Support

Players away from the puck must involve themselves as a passing option and as part of the attack. This requires that players are able to read the checking intentions and anticipate the movements of the puck carrier in order to react accordingly.

Support is accomplished by:

a) Triangulation: any offensive formation which creates offensive triangles, thus providing the puck carrier with two passing options and enabling the offensive team to create width and depth in the attack

b) Mid Lane: this applies to the offensive attack through the neutral zone which by passing to a teammate in the midlane or by carrying the puck from an outside lane to the midlane, the puck carrier is in position to initiate a play to either side. In the offensive zone, the attackers will also attempt to penetrate the slot (midlane) for a good scoring opportunity.

c) Numerical Advantage : good support can contribute to the pressure applied on the defense by creating numerical advantage and outnumbering the defenders in a confined area.

d) Movement: players away from the puck must be active in order to be involved in the attack.

e) Balance: although it is desirable to outnumber the opponent in the area of the puck, it is equally desirable to have balance in your attack by filling all three lanes. This will assist in stretching the defense which increases the space and time available to the attacking team.

Principle # 4 Transition

This is defined as the ability of a team to quickly move from defense to offense and vice versa.

Transition is accomplished by the Counter Attack: this can be done quickly by a fast break (pressure) or in a controlled manner with puck control.

Defensive Team Play

Defense is the basic phase of the game during which your team does not have possession of the puck. The purpose is to recover possession of the puck and/or prevent the opposition from scoring. In order for any team to be successful, they need play well defensively. Defensive team play has two basic objectives :

1. Deny or restrict the use of time and space by the offensive team
2. Regain possession of the puck or atleast limit puck possession by the opponent

Hockey Canada outlines 4 basic principles to achieve this objective:

Principle # 1 Pressure
Principle # 2 Stall/Contain
Principle # 3 Support
Principle # 4 Transition

Principle # 1 Pressure

Pressure reduces time and space. Pressure is accomplished by:

a) Speed – quickness to defend – limit offensive options – force errors
b) Pursuit – involves immediate and correct angling to limit opponent’s options
c) Concentration – grouping of defensive players to restrict space
d) Commit – determines whether the defensive player commits or contain the offensive player with the puck

Principle # 2 Stall/Contain

Force the opponent to stop or slow down the speed of the attack. Allow time for better defensive coverage. The defensive player pressures directly or steers the opponent to the outside lane. This is accomplished by holding the ice (as ub a two on one), keeping defensive side positioning, and forcing to the outside.

Principle # 3 Support

Support means that the defensive player must be active away from the puck by reducing the passing options and reading and reacting to the movement of the offensive players. This is usually accomplished by man to man or zone coverage. It also requires that the defensive team is not outnumbered in the defensive zone.

Principle # 4 Transition

The defensive team must be alert to change quickly from defense to offense when possession of the puck is gained from your opponent’s.

Basic Hockey Guidelines

Defensive Zone

- Think defense first and offense only when in full control of the puck
- Keep your head up and take the man first and then the puck. Take the offensive man out after he has passed the puck to eliminate a return pass.
- Cover the slot at all times. Move to a man coming from behind the net only when he is a direct threat to score.
- One defenseman should always be in front of the net and control any player in the low slot area. The defenseman should face up ice and be aware of players in front of the net. To watch the play in the corner, the defenseman should turn his head but keep his body squared up ice. The defenseman should not turn his back from the slot area unless a player is coming from behind the net and is a direct threat to score.
- When the defenseman has the puck just inside the blue line and is being pressured, he should dump the puck out over the blue line on the board side.
- When experiencing difficulty in moving th epuck out under pressure, freeze or ice the puck to get a face-off.
- Never pass the puck rink wide or through the center in your own end.
- Never pass the puck without looking in your own zone. The man must be there.
- Don’t shoot the puck arounds the boards unless a man is in position to receive it
- Never go backward in your own zone unless you are on a Power Play or there is no forechecking pressure.
- Never allow your team to be putnumbered in the defensive zone (ex. forwards are too high)

Neutral Zone – Offense

- If teammates are covered, dump the puck in or turn back and pass it to the defense, and then regroup and attack again.
- Never try to stickhandle past the opposition when teammates are with you
- The forwards without the puck should move to open ice with their stick on the ice, preparing to take a pass.
- Never go offside, straddle the blue line or cut in front of or behind the puck carrier.

Neutral Zone – Defense

- Backcheck by picking up the offside forward. Take the man to the net if he stays outside the defenseman. If the player cuts to the middle in front of the defense, stay in the lane. The backchecker should be on the inside of the offensive man, and slightly ahead of him.
- If the backchecker is trailing the play, pick up the high slot area.

Offensive Zone

- One man always drives to the net (drive for the rebounds, you must want to score, release the puck quickly)
- Shoot the puck when in a key scoring area (slot). Extra passes can end up in misses opportunities.
- The defenseman should shoot the puck quickly from the point. If you are pressured from the point, dump it in the corner.

Thanks Dean & Tom, for making me think.......I thought I got Sundays off!?

Teaching anticipation - Hopefully players have a general understanding of anticipation meaning something like "being ready for what comes next before it happens," but I would ask them to explain what it is and why it matters. Simplifying the game into 3 possible situations (loose puck, they have it, or we have it) is important here as the transition from one to the other is what we are trying to anticipate better. Using some examples from recent games or even other sports could help establish relevance too.....think of a shortstop in baseball turning a double play. This play does not happen unless the shortstop and 2nd baseman size up the situation first and then react properly and quickly. This is the kind of reaction we are looking for, only on the fly over and over again in hockey.......making proper reads and reacting to the ever changing state of possession, and it needs to happen with ALL 5 PLAYERS, not just the ones closest to the puck. That is why I really like Kai's video of Detroit with the red, yellow & green indicator on the screen...it is a great example of all 5 players doing just that.

In order for anticipation to happen properly players need to read visible cues that indicate the level of puck possession by either team, and I would next switch the focus to this. I would ask players to indicate what those cues might be and how it might affect their positioning on the ice (assuming they have a basic understanding of d-zone coverage). Playing even strength transition games should help demonstrate the need to be ready for changes in possession, and I would gradually add players (D2, F2 & F3) until we have built up to full 5 v 5 situations. Playing games with modified rules, like only 2 sec. for puck possession before passing or shooting, would help re-enforce the concept. If I had a little more tech savvy I would look at video of our own team play in the same way that Kai looked at the Red Wings and ask players to evaluate how we are doing, and I would keep the concept front and center through all the areas of the game for the season.

Thanks for making me think it through. I could write more, but I didn't anticipate having to do so much work on a Sunday. (Actually, I slammed my finger in a car door today, so it's going pretty slowly!) How did I do?

Dave

One of the best ways to teach anticipation is to teach using SILENCE!

Why?

I will wait until a few people respond before I provide more details...

I'm going to wait for DaveM, Eric, Kai, rcmat and maybe Paulie (he doesn't post too often) to take a crack at it. I think Tom might know... so Tom, don't post about this yet! <evil laugh>

Waiting for people to do their 'homework'!

Anxiously waiting...!

Dean,

You have me thinking of the past . I know it's not what you are talking about , but I can remember Walter Gretzky use to have Wayne sit and watch theTO Maple Leafs ( GO LEAFS) . He gave Wayne a blank piece of paper ( with a diagram of a rink) and a pen. Wayne would follow the puck as the puck moved om the TV. It helped him see the movements of the puck.
Also I remember Wayne saying (but don't Quote me) that he had to change his game at the higher levels. He had to re train himself to always go to open ice . Don't always follow the puck but move to an open spot away from the puck .

I miss the old days of watching Wayne play . I remember people saying how slow he skates sometimes. But he was just buying time for his teammates too catch up and work his magic. He was in control of the flow and dictated where the puck was going all the time.
Sorry for the trip down memory lane... Wayne's GIT I guess !!
RK

RK - I do miss watching 'Whine' Gretzky... the 80's treated us to some outstanding hockey - Oilers vs Flames. I enjoyed going the the games with my dad. Tons of great memories there... starting in the old Calgary Corral in 1980, when the Flames arrived from Atlanta.

Back to the question...

Excellent! Great responses, everybody! I love this site!

Here's another question to get your mind thinking ever harder: How many senses do we have? This is related to my question about silence... and how it relates to teaching anticipation. (I am kind of surprised nobody has hit the nail directly on the head yet. It isn't a trick question - it is actually very obvious. You might slap yourself upside the head when I tell you...!!!)

Anybody else want to take another stab or provide more details?


I will post more later Sunday... <evil laugh squared!>