Systems Concepts Series: O Zone Possession
This is the fourth in a series detailing how Pascal Vincent intends his Blue Jackets team to play and the concepts behind his system.
Throughout Belfry Hockey, there’s a recurring theme. There are certain situations that are bad. Our team, or any team in these situations, is vulnerable to being scored on or losing the puck.
If we only look specifically at performance in those situations we’re missing their context within the bigger picture. If we only evaluate players who are magnificent puck protectors we will miss a whole class of players who are good at staying out of those dangerous positions in the first place.
Shots against are one such situation. If our team is giving up dangerous shots, and therefore likely goals, we can look at those situations and say “we should be better at defending” but we would be missing some of the upstream causes of those shots against. What if, instead, the puck was never in the zone in the first place? Let’s look instead at what our team can do to avoid being in vulnerable situations rather than their performance within those situations.
This change in mindset, of accepting vulnerable positions as something to avoid instead of as weaknesses to improve, is a mine of tremendous insight from Darryl Belfry.
Establishing Concepts of Play
Up to this point, we’ve covered some of the fundamentals of hockey and we’ve touched on some formations and concepts that can help liberate the Blue Jackets’ offense in line with the objectives detailed by Darry Belfry.
We know that in order to protect and attack the interior of the ice, players will need to be adept at a dual positioned structure and ready to attack when the conditions dictate. This newfound structure and competency will result in more creativity when attacking dangerous areas via increased appetite for risk because we’re ready for either outcome.
In his opening paragraph regarding offensive zone possession, Belfry offers a familiar insight.
“The most important part in understanding the offensive zone is knowing that while we are in possession of the puck, we are also organizing our defense when the puck becomes loose or we lost it, so we can get the puck back as quickly as possible to sustain offensive zone pressure.”
Compare this quote with Blue Jacket head coach Pascal Vincent’s.
“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”
Before we get too much into the events that make up offensive zone play, we need to dig into a couple of the concepts that Darryl Belfry establishes in this book.
Heaviness on the Puck
This concept starts out quite familiar and easy to understand. We want players who are hard to take the puck from. Pascal Vincent references as much when he says hockey is a game of bullies. Puck protection, or rather, the ability to not turnover the puck is what Darryl Belfry categorizes as heaviness.
“Heaviness at the puck, if you want to really understand how it works and what leads to it, can be traced back to positional discipline.”
So, everything we’ve talked about up to this point plays a part in puck retention. It isn’t only the image of Jagr or Crosby on the boards spinning off of contact or a giant man sticking his arm out and holding a defender away from the puck. Heaviness is rotation, effort, anticipation and positional duality. Now, heaviness is mental rather than purely physical. It isn’t a solo effort, but a team one.
“On the other side, when you have the puck, does your positional discipline offer you a chance to alleviate pressure through puck movement? If you think the consistent solution to strong pressure presence is skating the puck in self-escape, you will find you’ll skate the puck into a turnover more often than you’d like.”
Here, off-puck plays come to the forefront. We can reference the role of the F2 to skate into support positions but also the role of the F1 in utilizing that support. A team that plays together is more difficult to take the puck from than a team of individuals trying to do it themselves.
Outside of the book, Belfry goes into further detail on these concepts on his podcast. The most important insight as it relates to the Blue Jackets is, in my opinion, the follwoing:
“Puck movement, and being able to manage the puck in a way that makes it difficult for the opponent to be in position to pressure you. That’s a way of being heavy.”
Essentially, quick and precise puck movement, utilizing the support, is the embodiment of heaviness. Players who have a mental map and quick read of the conditions of play on the ice, and who have the skill to make the next play quickly, don’t need to protect the puck because they can entirely avoid that situation.
Pressure Presence
“Pressure presence limits the puck-carrier’s options and encourages the puck-carrier to slow down, to move into small space or punt it.”
The genesis of this concept comes once again from team connectedness and positional discipline. Whereas heaviness comes often from utilizing support and moving into those positions, pressure presence is the opposite defensive force. It seeks to sever the puck from it’s support avenues and limit options.
Then, once the decision space is choked away from the opposition with the puck, pressure presence seeks to organize the next layer of attack. Presence is a result of a team playing well structured hockey utilizing the concepts of triangulation, shape and support that we’ve covered up to this point.
“The takeaway isn’t enough, it needs to lead you into the next play”
NHL Examples
While Darryl Belfry mentions players like Patrick Kane often in this book, I’m reminded of another young star who seems to have a very specific and unique identity. Matthew Tkachuk. While many label him as a unicorn, and I’m not here to disagree, it seems like his understanding of heaviness and pressure presence make him the prototype of a modern heavy player. Mitch Brown writes:
“He gets the puck, then makes a quick pass to the open teammate, either one-touching it or just delaying long enough. Either way, he’s always looking to beat at least one defender with his passes. At the offensive zone blueline, he’s looking for give-and-goes, and if not, he’ll simply hit the brakes and set up the trailer.”
While Tkachuk’s other heaviness attributes are easier to understand, it’s the way that his playmaking, spatial awareness and anticipation stacked with handing and passing abilities, layers with him that makes him so dynamic.
Consider too, then, the Colorado Avalanche. Darryl Belfry offers this sequence as the ultimate understanding of Heaviness and Pressure Presence.
Four Pillars of Offensive Zone Possession
In order to evaluate a team’s connectedness, and the downstream result of successful offensive zone play, we’ll need to understand some of the objectives that this connectedness seeks to accomplish. Darryl Belfry here outlines the basis for the four pillars of offensive zone play:
Offensive zone possession
Exit Kill
Shot Recovery
Re-entry
These can be considered mini “game-states” that each have their own objectives and postures. The best possession teams will be good in each of these situations and they will take up positions within their shape that respond well to the next game-state.
If a team turns offensive zone possession into a shot, and it is an easy recovery that blends back into possession, then we’ll know that the players made a connected decision. If a player with possession in the offensive zone dumps a puck into a corner and the defensive team is first to it, they did not make the best decision within a connected system (all dumps are not equal, some serve a purpose and some are certainly better than an open-ice turnover).
Offensive Zone Possession
I’ll start here, it’s important. Vincent and Belfry have already detailed how existing in this territorial and possession state is the most favorable position. What they also know, however, is that it will end. Most desirably in a goal after which the puck is returned to a neutral territorial and possession state via a faceoff at center-ice.
Many times, the puck is simply turned over. A shot that is saved or blocked is a neutral puck. A rimmed puck is a neutral puck. All of these need to be recovered by one team or the other.
Some shots are better than others, a concept covered in depth by many publicly available Expected Goals models. What we need to avoid then, is losing the puck outside of these desirable situations while simultaneously balancing the risk that comes with attacking the middle.
Enter, heaviness at the puck and pressure presence.
Exit Kill
This concept is pretty intuitive, especially if you’ve followed other analytics. Zone-exits with possession are highly prized events and the defensemen who are good at them are paid handsomely (Zach Werenski). The goal of a good offensive zone defensive unit will then be to disrupt this event.
There’s some preliminary work here done by Ryan Stimson in measuring OppCE% (opposing controlled exit%) and how it relates to downstream goals and winning hockey games. He concluded, separately, that an aggressive forecheck is best.
“You can cut off a team's ability to transition out of their own end by applying an aggressive forecheck. This has a positive effect on your team's shot generation and does not necessarily mean you will be unable to defend your blue line.”
If being aggressive and killing exits is the goal, pressure presence and other aforementioned tactics (High 3v2, Active Defensemen, Reliable F3) are the means to achieve them.
“The duality of offense and defense is that the better and the more players playing on the inside offensively, the faster we will be able to react defensively to get the puck back. Our defensive players are already ready to defend from the inside out.”
The system once again remains connected. If we have stopped the exit, we need a group of players ready to attack off of the turnover.
Shot Recovery
If we continue the theme of avoiding bad situations altogether, we can conclude that shot recovery would be preventative of killing an exit. We simply do not have to worry about forcing a turnover if we recover possession from our induced neutral puck.
Shots are, ultimately, the goal of offense in this zone. If we expect shots to go on net we should also expect, and plan for, recovering them.
A team who is executing their pressure presence and positional discipline well will recover more shots because they are shooting in anticipation of recovery and positioning in anticipation of shooting. Sometimes, this looks like a pass-off-pads type shot, sometimes it’s simply selecting a side of the net based on teammate’s numerical advantage in an area. Most times, it’s sealing the defender from the boards (most common rebound location) via body positioning as a player anticipates the shot.
Re-Entry
If a team is contending with the duality well once again, they will be in a fantastic position to re-enter the zone after they have forced a neutral puck and/or turnover. One of the better cases of a good exit kill, and pressure presence, is a cleared puck into the neutral zone.
In this case, the defending team can retreat to recover an uncontested puck, turn around and attack quickly. This is very valuable offense as it happens, ideally, at speed against players who haven’t had time to set their structure, close gaps for rush defending, or get off of the ice.
The Columbus Blue Jackets
Up to this point, a lot of this writing has been technical work. Throughout the first couple of games I have been dry running a tracking project so that I could add data to the already fantastic publicly available analytics of HockeyViz, NaturalStatTrick, AllThreeZones and more.
The side-benefit of this tracking project has been more time for intentional viewing of the play. When I have to mark down details of on-ice events, I become more intimate with the machinations behind the Blue Jackets performance. As such, I am amassing a library of clips, or at least timestamps that will later become clips, of a lot of the concepts being illustrated in Belfry’s book.
The upside, is that we’re seeing some of these concepts implemented in real time. The downside, is that there’s still a long way to go for this club.
While I continue to refine the exact tracking project, I intend to soon publish an article showing these clips and who on the Blue Jackets are doing a good job of implementing the concepts behind the systems.