Offence starts from your defence.

One area of focus for our team this season was our ability to carry the puck into the offensive zone. The key word there, however, is ability — we’d love to carry the puck into the offensive zone 100% of the time, because more often than not our results mirror the chart below.

In this particular game, we got a shot on net every time we carried the puck over the blue line in the middle of the ice. What’s almost more impressive to me is our results when we carried the puck in on the left side of the ice. That’s over 30 shots on goal accounted for just from left-side controlled zone entries!

This was a playoff game too, so who’s responsible for all those entries? You know, besides the coach who didn’t yell at his players to dump the puck in for the first five months of the season.

Here’s some examples from my team, the Winkler Flyers of the Manitoba Junior Hockey League:

1. Wide zone entries by defencemen

It’s a defenceman! The left D-man, #14 Nathan Poolman, is blessed with quick feet and a killer instinct. He’s the perfect example of a hockey player who moves his feet first and asks questions later. We do individual stats as well, and his normal partner, #6 Garret Szeremley’s stats are inverted. Poolman carries the puck into the zone, Szeremley passes it into the zone, as you can see from this clip.

Here are the zone-entry stats from a game a few weeks earlier:

You can see the same trend. Obviously the forwards are mixed into these stats as well, but it gave us a clear picture of what our attack looks like, particularly the fact that our forecheck needed work.

But that’s up to the forwards (mostly). This is about your defence and how they can impact your attack.

There’s a few reasons why it’s powerful to have defence who can skate and transport the puck over the blue line:

• It’s hard for backchecking forwards to pick everyone up
• It’s hard to look away from a player who’s able to march through the neutral zone with the puck
• The goalie is likely facing more threats than he or she is comfortable with

The clip above is a goal resulting after a weak-side D breakout. You can see that when #16 Drake Burgin enters the zone, the backchecking forwards are confused about who to pick up. Their gap isn’t great because of the breakout, so when #26 Ian Tookenay turns on the jets and goes to the net with his stick on the ice, he’s tough to stop.

Here’s the same basic play from a few months earlier:

The defenders actually run into each other because they don’t know who to cover. Bonus: watch our guy skate to the net to pick up the puck. First junior goal alert for #17 Cameron Critch.

And what if they don’t want the greedy forwards to get all the glory? Here’s another Poolman entry, this time from the middle of the ice — Szeremley passed the puck to him in the D-zone before the clip started — if you have your audio on, you can hear the Steinbach commentator talk about Poolman’s surprise about all the space he had to skate.

Good net drive from the forwards, they finally did something right.

2. Second opportunity offence after zone entry

Ok, pick up the puck and skate it into the zone and score off the rush. Easy. What if you don’t score right away?

The same advantage is gained: there’s a defenceman deep in the zone somewhere, and if he can pull defenders to him, then someone else could open up, particularly if you can enter the zone from the middle of the ice.

Back to the individual stats. Like I said above, #6 Szeremley is much more likely to pass the puck out of the defensive zone and into the offensive zone, while his partner, #14 Poolman, is much more likely to skate it in.

In this clip you can see those tendencies in action. The two make it work because they’re playing to their strengths. We’d all love to skate like Poolman, but it’s not realistic for everybody. The analytics support this clip because we enter the zone with possession, but the skill to hinge the puck D to D, dart across the neutral zone and bank a puck to ourselves off the boards, delay, and then hit the trailing defenceman for a seeing-eye snipe top shelf?

Tough to teach that. I mean, I taught them that. But it was tough.

I’ll have more offensive zone tactics involving the D in a future post. But I thought that was a fun one to add.

3. Defence feeds your offence

The last thing I want to demonstrate is that playing like this isn’t possible without good defensive fundamentals first.

The clip below starts with a good blue line confrontation from #16 Drake Burgin.

This is important because it highlights how much harder it is to get chances in the offensive zone when you don’t carry the puck in. The puck still gets in the zone, but #4 Trent Sambrook slides and picks up the mid-lane drive, and our forward comes back to pick up their F3 (sort of).

Winnipeg still gets control of the puck, but we have good structure and five players back hard, so we keep them to the perimeter of the ice, which isn’t easy against this team because they’re so fast and skilled. Good sticks, good slash support on the breakout, and a terrifying but effective east-west pass back to Burgin who’s joined the rush. This is an example of a forward carrying the puck into the offensive zone, but you can trace the success of the rush back to the initial blue line confrontation.

Check it out:

Same thing here in this next video. Both Szeremley and Poolman confront the opposition before the blue line, forcing a dump-in. Virden actually recovers after a good forecheck, but everyone is back hard and our defensive structure feeds our offence. And the result is the last goal we scored this season.

A couple caveats: the biggest thing to remember is that there is still a time and place to dump the puck in or soft chip it into space. I can see three offensive blue line turnovers from this season in my nightmares. The art of entering the zone without possession when the other team has a good gap or good back pressure is a topic for another day.

Carrying the puck into the zone as a defenceman is hard work, but it’s rewarding. All that said, I’ll leave you with two clips where I was actually screaming for Poolman and Burgin to dump the puck in.

Good thing they didn’t listen: