“The top teams in the NHL do the exact same things over and over and over again and do it extremely well. We want to do the same thing.”

As Davis Payne explains early on in his TCS Live presentation, power plays can be complicated, if you let them be complicated. Payne, who previously was an Assistant Coach with the Ottawa Senators, keeps it simple: “We need to understand exactly what we’re doing, exactly how we’re doing it and how often we’re doing it.”

The Senators finished 11th on the power play during the 2022-23 season with a PP percentage of 22.3%, so clearly Payne knows what he's talking about.

During Payne’s 28-minute presentation, the product of Port Alberni on Vancouver Island goes into great detail on the four main points of power play possession: faceoffs, breakouts, entries & retrievals. These are fundamental pieces, explains Payne, ones he is working hard to instill into his young Senators team.

Payne wants to build a recession proof power play and “in order to do that, we need to know what we’re doing, when we’re doing it and simplifying the decision process for our top offensive players.”

More on Payne:

Payne first stepped behind an NHL bench when the St Louis Blues promoted him from their AHL affiliate, the Peoria Rivermen, to become their Head Coach part way through the 2009-2010 season. He would remain with the Blues until 2011.

Following his time in St Louis, Payne was hired by the Los Angeles Kings as an Assistant Coach. He remained in LA for 5 seasons and helped the Kings capture their second Stanley Cup in 2014. From California he made the move to upstate New York to join the Buffalo Sabres as an Associate Coach to Phil Housley for two seasons.

For the past three seasons Payne has been an Assistant Coach with the upstart Senators.

As a player, Payne was drafted by the Edmonton Oilers in the 1989 NHL Draft out of Michigan Tech. He played eight professional seasons, including 22 games with the Boston Bruins.