In the process of rebuilding my zone entry/exit database, I was looking through my inaugural project from 2013-14 and got a little nostalgic. This was when zone entry tracking was in its beginning stages and the most we knew was that carrying the puck into the zone was more optimal for dumping the puck when it came to creating offense & winning games. It lined up with common sense but having the numbers to back it up was groundbreaking at the time.
What was ironic about that particular season was that the Los Angeles Kings won the Cup, a team that dumped the puck in more than anyone & played a pretty ugly brand of hockey. Every team was trying to get “bigger and tougher” to compete with them and the Bruins at the time & most games were a bit of a slugfest. On the other end, you had the Chicago Blackhawks, who were consistently one of the best offensive teams in the league and the gold standard for what an offense based off controlled zone entries can look like. Who was another team that ranked well that year? The Tampa Bay Lightning.
It was Jon Cooper’s first full season as a head coach, they lost Steven Stamkos early in the year to a brutal leg injury & traded Martin St. Louis at the deadline. Yet they were still one of the top offensive teams in that year & one of only six teams in the league that carried the puck in on more than 50% of their zone entries. Their forward corps was anchored by free agent signing Valtteri Filppula & a handful of rookies by the name of Tyler Johnson, Ondrej Palat along with second-year player Alex Killorn. Also lurking was Nikita Kucherov, a second round pick from two years prior who they gave a shot after the injuries to Stamkos & others. He had only 18 points in 52 games, but showed a high degree of skill and an incredible ability to create plays out of nothing off the rush.
They ended up losing in the first round, but it was easy to see the seeds of what they were building. It was going to be a team that lived & died by offense and defended by simply having the puck more than the other team. It took seven seasons, but they finally climbed that mountain & won their Stanley Cup. Only in a completely different way than what their original blueprint was.
That’s right, Tampa Bay was a dump-and-chase team this year & we saw that in full display with how they closed out their series against Dallas. Sure, they still have a lot of guys from that 2013-14 team and the top-end guys like Kucherov & Brayden Point weren’t going to be forced into playing like grinders, but the rest of the team played a very similar style to those Kings teams of the early 10’s. Alex Killorn & Tyler Johnson were winning puck races & setting up quick deflection plays on a matchup line with Anthony Cirelli while Ondrej Palat played the support role on their top line with Kucherov & Point. Same goes for Yanni Gourde, a 20+ goal scorer who had a tough year and thrived as a puck-hound on a third line with trade deadline acquisitions Blake Coleman & Barclay Goodrow.
My 23-year-old self might be a little disappointed in what this Tampa Bay team has become, because I loved in the 2014 team so much and wanted that to be the blueprint of how hockey is played in the future. I didn’t find dump-and-chase or games where teams traded forechecks very interesting. I considered dumping the puck in a “turnover” even when I was tracking things like puck recoveries to see if some teams were better at it than others. That and the style of hockey was just boring to me because it seemed like something that dragged a lot of good players out of the game. I saw so many talented players on teams I cheer for get lost in fourth line or healthy scratch purgatory because they couldn’t adapt to this style of play from juniors or college & goal-scoring just seemed to take a backseat to players who would just kill the clock for 8-9 minutes.
Just like bands I didn’t give a chance until my mid-20’s, my views have changed since then. Sure, a team whose only strategy on offense is dumping the puck in & playing bumper cars on the forecheck will have bad results. Just like a team who doesn’t want to dump the puck in at all will probably spend most of their time turning pucks over in the neutral zone if their team isn’t skilled enough. I don’t find games that are mostly dump-and-chase that interesting to watch as a fan & would prefer it if most teams in the league played like the Colorado Avalanche. That said, we have better data now that shows the strengths & drawbacks of both strategies.
The old studies of Eric Tulsky still hold true. Carrying the puck into the zone is the optimal way for creating offense. A more recent study by Ryan Stimson showed that carries with a passing play are even better for creating higher percentage shots (and created a metric to weed out empty calorie plays). Other studies by Stimson & Alex Novet show the value of disrupting zone exits and forcing turnovers on the forecheck. What’s one way of forcing turnovers? Dumping the puck in. We also have better ways of measuring how effective teams are at dump-and-chase with some of the newer data like puck recoveries, exit disruptions & Charlie O’Connor’s forechecking tracking project for the Flyers. As it’s true in all sports, it’s all about optimizing what you have in your roster, which is what Tampa Bay did in this playoff run.
I tend to get highway hypnosis with the amount of hockey I watch every season & I feel like it reached a new level this year with how many teams seemingly play the same way. There’s a lot of nuances to the game that I miss and it’s why I hope the memo to teams this off-season is that they need to get “grittier” because it got Tampa Bay over the hump. It worked for the Lightning but I’ve see how this story goes when a team that doesn’t have a Brayden Point or a Nikita Kucherov to freelance & take over a few shifts. Same can be said for teams that don’t have an Anthony Cirelli in their middle six or guys like Killorn, Johnson & Gourde who can still be great checking line players at high price tags in down seasons.
Tampa Bay had the players & the star talent for this to succeed, but when most of the league tries to play like this and what you’re left with is 25 teams who are defensively sound carbon copies of each other and their peak is that they might win a playoff round or two if they get lucky. Unless they have the star power to break the game open, that is. The salary cap forces this to an extent, but Tampa’s had to deal with this more than any team & they still kept their stars. The Lightning have always been kind of an odd-ball team, though. Their only tank picks on the roster were drafted over a decade ago, their two stars were drafted in the second & third round, they’ve missed on more first round picks than they’ve hit on & they’ve been able to trade those misses into good players like McDonagh & Sergachev. They’ve been in a cap jam for almost five years now & the most they seem to do is trade an expendable piece like JT Miller and fill their depth from within. It’s a tough model for any team to follow regardless of what you want your team identity to be. They’ve got another tough off-season coming up so it will be interesting to see what they do while front offices focus on how to copy them.
Final Thoughts
- Sometimes I worry that I dehumanize the players when I analyze the game & did my best to take the whole “playing hockey in a bubble during a pandemic” thing into account in my breakdowns on Twitter. Rewatching how the Stars played in Game 6 really put that into context because they looked flat out exhausted until the third period where they desperately needed a goal. They were down at least three regular forwards for Game 5 and played their best game of the series, surviving a ton of zone time & still putting up 18 scoring chances. It was a great, gutsy showing but I think it took most of their energy out of them. They didn’t have much legs for most of Game 6 and it was evident in that 6v5 sequence at the end of the game where they couldn’t do much except shoot from the outside a few times after nobody could get open or create a seam. They did what they needed to have a chance in this series, it’s just that Tampa could play the same type of game with better players.
- I said this on Twitter, but Blake Coleman is a pretty unique player in how he made the show. It’s not often you see a player make the NHL at 25 with the same team that drafted him because most players who finish all four years of college become free agents. The Devils signed him instead and he played 23 unimpressive games in his first call-up stint. Fast forward to the next year & he’s part of an important shutdown line with Travis Zajac & Stefan Noesen, posting very solid play-driving stats in a tough role. Then he repeats this level of play the next two years & scores 20+ goals as a bonus, all of which came on a bad Devils team. He is the rare case of a player figuring things out in his late 20’s, which basically doesn’t happen nowadays with hockey players peaking earlier & entry level contracts being at a premium.
What’s even more interesting about him is that he has just gotten better since his rookie season. His first year with the Devils was a case of him finding a niche & running with it, but his stats across the board have improved since. He is one of the few physical players that will carry the puck end-to-end to play keep away instead of grinding out the clock, which is likely why the Lightning paid such a high price for him. Just look at his stats with the Devils.
Even I was a little surprised when I saw this, but this is part of the reason why his line is so effective. Yes, they’re dumping the puck in most of the time but the ability to strike on the rush is there if they need it, especially with Yanni Gourde as the center. - Speaking of unexpected stats, how about Cedric Paquette making the only cross-seam pass of the game the other night? I honestly think that was the first one of his career.
- Another fun stat is that Patrick Maroon was one of only two Lightning players who carried the puck in on more than 50% of their entries in the Cup Final (the other was Brayden Point who had an insane 84% Carry-in rate in the post-season). Granted, this is only on 16 entries, but it was weird to see Tampa’s fourth line making the most plays off the rush out of their bottom-nine in the game the other night. I’ve always liked Maroon as a player even if he can’t play big minutes. I went on a Twitter rant the other day about why guys like Brandon Pirri are never used as power play specialists on the fourth line & I think Maroon is one of the few who has been able to fit into this niche. He plays a little more than your typical fourth liner & is more of a net-front guy on the power play, so it’s a different situation. Still, I always thought his skill was a little underrated and I would take him on my fourth line any day of the week.
- While Tampa is being praised for their forecheck, Dallas’ was also very good when it came to recovering the puck. It was a key to their success all playoffs long, but you saw the downside of it in the Final. They were still good at getting to the puck, it was just that had a few players who struggled to make any plays or produce any offense with their zone time. Jason Dickinson & Andrew Cogliano in particular. I used to get so frustrated watching Dallas’ younger players because I knew they could play in the AHL but it always seemed like they weren’t allowed to do much outside of the “system” once they got to Dallas. Roope Hintz broke out of this rut & so did Denis Gurianov. Dickinson has carved out a nice role for himself as a checking line player but I can’t help but wonder if there’s more there because it seems like all he’s allowed to do is skate in a straight line.
- After watching Gurianov excel in the first two rounds & finish off Vegas with that one-timer from the right faceoff dot, I can’t help but wonder why the Stars got away from that on their power play in this series. Their top power play took up most of the time & was focused on setting up Seguin or producing rebounds. The injury to Hintz probably gave them incentive to ride that first unit, too. Still, Gurianov’s arguably their best power play weapon outside of Pavelski & they still could have worked him in on that top power play unit without it disrupting much. I thought that could be one thing they might go to in that late third period power play when they were desperate for any offense. He had only four shot attempts on the power play all series, after having 18 in the previous three rounds.
- Shoutout to Anton Khudobin for running with this opportunity Dallas gave him. He was such a good goalie during his brief time with the Hurricanes and I was sad to see him go.
- I didn’t think Shattenkirk was great in Tampa Bay during the regular season, even if he was a massive bargain for what they got him for. He was light years better in the playoffs, especially at leading breakouts. I had wondered if this part of his game was gone with the knee injuries he had in New York. He looked like he did when he was with the Blues during this playoff run & I wonder how it will translate to a new team next year. I don’t know if “offensive zone specialist” is a real term for a defenseman, but that’s what I thought he was going to be limited to with him not being able to move & avoid checks as smoothly as he used to. I’m interested to see where he signs next year. Also wonder if Tyson Barrie is looking at this & thinking it could be him next year.
The Energy Line 