Understanding the numbers will help you make decisions on your team's deployment and how you play.

While we hockey coaches like to consider ourselves innovators — if you’re here that means you want to learn and try new things — when the game is on the line we all naturally revert to what’s worked in the past. That counts double when it comes to the power play and other situations where we have a lot of control. The most control you have as a coach starts when the puck is dropped on a power play. In practice, you control where your players skate on the breakout, how they enter the zone, and where they set up. Well, according to friend of the site Ryan Stimson, we haven’t been paying close enough attention to the numbers.

Analytics are a useful tool in our game. Understanding the numbers will help you make decisions on your team’s deployment and how you play. And for Stimson, numbers suggest there’s a more effective way to run our power play.

It’s worth a try.