Enforcers are often given these minutes because coaches feel they need to be “sheltered”. The upside to sheltering fourth liners is that it’s less likely the players immediately get trapped in their own zone and/or scored upon. The opportunity cost, however, is that the team’s stars can’t take on these assignments and begin their shifts with direct opportunities to score.
They require wingers like Thornton to exert forecheck pressure. Centers and defensemen generally are less important at keeping the puck in the zone than their wing counterparts in these situations.
We can treat an offensive zone faceoff as another kind of zone entry and look at how many shots the team gets before the puck gets cleared.
Offensive zone faceoffs are pretty comparable to zone entries in terms of shots generated.
In each case (i.e. for each team, in each series), an offensive zone faceoff generated more shots than an uncontrolled zone entry and fewer shots than a controlled zone entry.
This suggests two things:
· First, it may imply that dump and chase results in recovery of the puck less than half the time, since teams do better to have the ref drop the puck in between two men.
· Secondly, this is a reason to take a shot whenever you get a reasonable chance – having it covered by the goalie or deflected into the netting for an offensive zone faceoff is much better than risking a clear.
THE IMPACT OF WINNING AN OZ FACEOFF
I got a number of questions about the impact of winning and losing offensive zone faceoffs. The way to think about this is to look at the shot rates in the time following a faceoff:
In the long-run, shot rates ultimately converge regardless of whether the faceoff is won or lost. Obviously even-strength shot rate differential converges to zero, while on the PP it is strongly positive for the team with the man-advantage.
It’s interesting to see that the peak shot rate is higher at even-strength than on the PP. Just a guess, but a PP faceoff win allows a team to set up in the offensive zone and work the puck around for a better shot. At even-strength, teams are much more likely to win the draw back to the point and blast the puck at the net, hoping for a screen or a deflection.
This gives us a goal differential of +2.45 goals per 100 extra faceoff wins, or 245 faceoffs per two points in the standings. (Incidentally, a neutral zone faceoff is worth +0.9 goals per 100 extra faceoff wins, or two points in the standings per 657 extra faceoff wins.)
A real impact, but not overly huge impact.
On the PP, the shooting percentage for shots for is 8.98% while it’s 7.21% for shots against. That gives us +3.66 goals per 100 faceoff extra wins.
This tells us that a team needs to win 164 additional power-play or penalty-kill faceoffs to get one additional win. But a team typically only takes 790 such faceoffs per season, so it would be virtually impossible to win 164 more faceoffs.
On the other hand, teams typically take 2200 even-strength faceoffs in the offensive or defensive zone per year (remember that the offensive zone result is symmetric in the defensive zone) so it is much more likely that a team could win 245 additional faceoffs.
STRATEGY AFTER WINNING AN OZ FACEOFF (DON’T SHOOT THE PUCK FROM THE POINT)
(July 29, 2020)
the odds of that shot Ryan Graves scored on going in is less than 2 percent. And yet, when a team wins a face-off in the offensive zone, more often than not, a point shot is what comes next.
This season, at even-strength, over half (51.2%) of all shot attempts that followed a won offensive zone face-off came from the point (beyond the top of the face-off circles).
What should be a last resort, shooting from distance, is in fact, what happens most often. In no other game state should this be a preferred method of creating offense so why in this instance is shooting from distance so universally accepted?
Most likely, players believe a screen, rebound or deflection will increase their odds of creating a goal enough to make it a worthwhile option. That certainly seems to be the belief in hockey but is it true?
No.
The odds of scoring on these plays are low enough to question why they occur so often especially when you consider puck recovery amounts to little more than a 50/50 chance.
So, there must be a reason so many teams default to these low percentage play in this area of the game, right?
More often than not, offensive teams are not able to win the draw cleanly. When they do, there’s an opportunity to run set plays, aimed at generating chances from quality scoring areas. Many teams do and that’s great.
It’s harder to generate meaningful offense off a scrambled draw or when a defender rushes the point.
Maintaining puck possession should take precedence over shooting from above the circles. There are plenty of examples of how to do this that would help increase the attacking teams’ chances of scoring once they win an offensive zone face-off.
The main takeaway here is that, more often than not, attacking defensemen seem to have a shoot-first mentality when they get the puck after a won face-off. I believe teams should put more of a focus on possessing the puck than shooting from distance. Skating or passing the puck to open space in order to create higher probability scoring chances should yield more positive results.
I’ll go one step further and suggest if there isn’t a skating or passing option at all, a defenseman might be wise to rim the puck around the boards to a far-side winger or D partner.
Efficiency is the key and shooting from above the circles after a won OZ face-off seems to be one of the more inefficient, yet universally adopted concepts in hockey.
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