Systems Concepts Series: an Introduction to Pascal Vincent's Blue Jackets

Detailing the series and plan going forward.

Pascal Vincent

Since Pascal Vincent has taken the reigns of coaching responsibilities for the Columbus Blue Jackets, he has given a few interviews detailing the identity and style he intends for the Blue Jackets in the coming season.

He, along with the analytics department, put in a lot of work over the summer to identify the areas of performance that differentiate playoff teams from lottery teams. The primary area of focus? Limiting the goals against.

Vincent outlined the three areas for improvement (similar quotes pulled from here if you don’t have a subscription to The Athletic) that he believed the Blue Jackets most needed to improve to get back their defense back to playoff level.

(Side Note: Aaron Portzline shared some sad news earlier in the week, go check it out and offer whatever support and understanding you can).

1. Personnel

2. Tracking (dictating opposing teams routes through intelligent backchecking)

3. Protecting and Attacking the Slot

Fortunately for us, Vincent has also outlined some of the themes that will define the Blue Jackets under his tutelage. These themes give us precious insight into the tactics and playstyle and offer further guidance to our attempts at evaluating the team from the outside.

The system starts with possession and, because of that, in the o-zone as well.

“By trade, Vincent is an offensive coach, but that gives him a perspective on what makes a team hard to break down defensively. He also believes strongly that offense is defense, as you can’t give up chances if you possess the puck and keep it in the offensive zone”

But Vincent doesn’t stop there, he espouses the need for cohesion as a group. Hockey is a fast game and if you’re not anticipating the next play, you’re behind.

“We want all of our systems to be connected,” Vincent said, “so that if we turn the puck over, we’re still in a good position. It’s a game of mistakes, but we should be connected”

Me

Earlier this offseason, I took a look, using tracked stats from AllThreeZones, at what the best defensive teams looked like. Over the course of a few articles, I examined those qualities as they related to the Blue Jackets.

What can the Blue Jackets learn from the best defences in the NHL?

What makes a good partner for a top-minute puck-moving defenseman?

Ultimately, I found performance events that portrayed the type of skillsets contained within a select few of tin the NHL. Using AllThreeZones’ charts, it was very easy to see that CBJ defensemen were all clumped firmly in a zone that the best teams players, even the 3rd pairing defensemen, rarely resided in. Blue Jacket defensemen allowed entries with control at an inexcusable rate and actively disrupted them even less.

I believe these articles touched on one area that Pascal Vincent mentioned, personnel, though my understanding of cause/effect were ultimately shallow. I lacked the understanding of the finer details that would have illuminated how the other concepts intertwined and explained the next two bullet points.

I hit on them a little later, with the help of Jack Han’s Hockey Tactics 2023, when I looked into what Adam Boqvist could do to reclaim his game. Though the performance was being attributed to individual defensemen, they are likely not the sole reason for struggle in this regard (they aren’t fully excused, however, refer to Vincent’s first bullet for improvement). The solution, as Jack Han likes to say, was upstream.

Put a simpler way, in examining the differences in performance between Colorado and Columbus, I had only started on the first step to uncovering the interconnected nature of hockey performance.

Darryl Belfry

Over the course of the summer, I sought to upgrade my knowledge of the game. In seeing how complicated addressing the problem of entry defense was, I realized I couldn’t just look at the stats and find the answer.

Thankfully for me, Darryl Belfry (a premier performance coach whose clients include Auston Matthews, Patrick Kane, Nathan MacKinnon, Sidney Crosby, and both Jack and Quinn Hughes, among others I’m sure) released a book detailing his understanding of the game of hockey.

(Side Note: I discovered Darryl Belfry through his participation on the Hockey PDOcast, which I also highly recommend as a source of intelligent discussion about hockey.)

Let’s take a quick dip into the ocean that is Darryl Belfry’s repository of hockey knowledge.

According to Darryl Belfry, the best players in the game of hockey exist in a constant duality between offense and defense. If a player is only ever playing one of those things, they won’t be fully prepared for the future sequence of events.

The moment we attempt to separate any of the specific events from their flow in game, we lose detail that informs not only the context of the event but it’s future impact.

Here, defense helps offense which in turn helps defense again. Simply put, we cannot begin evaluating our defense based exclusively on the shots, or entries, that they give up because if they are giving up shots, or entries, they’ve lost the primary battle in the first place.

Belfry opens the book with a scathing critique of old hockey adages. He believe that many coaches’ desire for players to “keep it simple” are making them fundamentally worse at the game of hockey. He breaks down eight myths, also known as the “conventional wisdom” of the old hockey men, and then opens into his collective operating system for hockey: The Interconnected Game Model.

For now, I’ll retreat to the comfortable beach of simplicity before I drown myself by trying to offer a summary of the entire book.

Pascal Vincent, Darryl Belfry and Me

Belfry Offense book will form the basis of the lens through which I will analyze Pascal Vincent’s Blue Jackets. To what degree do their outlooks on the game differ? Time may tell, but the book will at least give us some of the insight into X’s and O’s that NHL coaches are so often reticent to share.

Up to this point, the words of Pascal Vincent should offer a lot of encouragement for the validity of the book as it relates to his systems. The insight provided by Darryl Belfry appears to be relevant to how Pascal Vincent intends to coach the team. While the system preference detail may not line up perfectly, we can, at very least, evaluate the objectives properly.

In this way, I will outline the next series of articles by the concepts I will seek to tackle in each. Each of these is related to an area of improvement identified by Pascal Vincent or of the themes he has preached outside of those areas.

1. Personnel

2. Offensive Zone Possession

3. Connectivity

4. Slot Protection and Attacking

5. The Concept of Center-Ice

6. Tracking

I will attempt to add film clips to support the concepts I am introducing, using clips from Blue Jackets pre-season games when possible, but much of my breakdowns will involve information coming directly from Belfry Offense. I’ve seen quite a lot on video that I’ve liked, but haven’t been clipping live and haven’t been able to access the games after the fact, so the next few days are going to be crucial!

It’s possible that the articles may expand, bifurcate, rearrange or even contract and merge as I continue to wade through the context and order of ideas. Hopefully these are done before opening night but there’s a lot of meat on these bones and I want to give us all time to properly digest it.

At the end of this series, I will introduce the tracking project in which I will attempt to gather data about how the Blue Jackets are performing across Pascal Vincent’s areas of improvements and themes.