Introducing “Upon Further Review,” a semi-regular feature where Justin Bourne uses video and data to highlight a team, player, trend or moment. First up, Leon Draisaitl’s passing.
Just because you know a professional athlete is going to do something doesn’t mean you can stop them from doing it. Alexander Ovechkin has been hitting one-timers from the top of the left circle for so long with success it will forever be “the Ovi spot,” and even with that being obvious, teams can’t stop him from scoring from there. What’s scary is, were teams not aware of it, and were they not trying to steer the Capitals away from creating a clean look for him in that window, he’d have scored even more from there. Teams have tried their level best to eliminate it, yet they can’t.
I bring that up because in this season’s “Upon Further Review” series, the tendencies I highlight will not necessarily be things that opponents can eliminate. I would expect though, that with more awareness, coaches and teams would at least be able to minimize the damage these tendencies can cause.
After hearing Elliotte Friedman’s interview with Leon Draisaitl – where Draisaitl all but admits he (100 per cent justifiably) considers himself one of the game’s best passers – I was inspired to look into just how he does it.
This season Draisaitl is … lemme check here … yep, first in the NHL in assists with 11 through eight games. Nine of them are primaries, as in, first passes that lead directly to goals. He does play with Connor McDavid fairly often, but the point is the guy finds people all over the ice, making passes that range from “How is he going to get this over there WOW” moments, to completed passes for goals before you ever realized his teammate was open.
A small cluster of doozies here, keeping it to this season’s eight games:
I can’t decide which I like more, that one-touch out of the slot to the backside on the power play, or the backdoor, backhand-dish under the goalie’s stick. Tough call. In looking into Draisaitl’s tendencies, one thing stood out: he’s a left shot, but he’s way, way more involved on the right side of the offensive zone. These are his passes and pass receptions in the O-zone so far this season. Basically, here’s where he touches the puck on offence:
If you consider he plays that side on their power play and adjust for even strength, it’s comparable, just with less volume:
He gets it and moves it from the right side, which is precisely where he lives on offence. If you dial it in even further to what SportLogiq calls “playmaking,” that tendency still remains strong.
I went back to previous seasons and can confirm that where he operates and creates from doesn’t change. He’s most dangerous from the right circle. Draisaitl doesn’t play in traffic so much as he removes himself from it, and his teammates know where to look for him. They can find him poaching off to the right, often opened-up with his stick to the middle of the ice. From there he can one-time pucks, as he did in scoring the game-winner against Chicago Thursday night.
Watch him get to “his” ice:
And of course, he can distribute, which is what we’re talking about today. As we saw on this backdoor pass in the opening video…
…He’s also just about the best player in the league (or one of the five best) at using his backhand, arguably better than most use their forehands.
Here’s what Draisaitl’s patterns look like on non-goals, which make up the bulk of a player’s attempts.
Here, he enters the zone and gets to his side and makes a backhand pass that doesn’t amount to much. But he stays out wide on the right, and later throws it in for a dangerous potential touch from a teammate:
Below, he hangs out in his happy place and when a puck finds him, he finds his teammate for what’s a potentially dangerous one-timer were it not for a tremendous block:
Draisaitl’s so comfortable there that any time he gets a quick touch on the puck, his first thought seems to be to slip it into the middle as quick as there’s an option:
Even on rushes, he’ll open up comfortably into his preferred nook and make one of those quick slips:
I know this one below doesn’t quite connect, but you can see how it’s within millimetres of taking the play from a 5-on-5 moment of no consequence to Draisaitl’s teammate almost having an assured goal:
He has unbelievable vision, and a clear area from which he prefers to view the rink.
As companies like SportLogiq grow in prominence, and the league’s player-tracking technology further integrates itself into our coverage and discussion of the sport, I can’t help but wonder how this sort of readily available information will affect coaching.
One of the reasons hockey has felt impervious to heavy coaching – particularly on the offensive side of things – is that there are so many games, so much ice time, and so few trackable, documentable statistics. In the past it took huge samples of goals and assists to figure out player tendencies (particularly from non-stars).
But with information like what I’ve outlined above, I wonder how much NHL staffs can find out about player and team tendencies and adjust the way they defend. During my time as a video coach, finding a tendency like this was the goal, but in watching a few games to prep for an opponent, a trend rarely had time to reveal itself (it happened so rarely I was delighted when it did, and can still remember each occasion).
This is the type of thing that seems super, super easy in hindsight – Draisaitl likes the right side, no kidding, just watch him, some will say – but it will be relevant for lesser players, not just those who play a ton and get a ton of points. It will be relevant for teams you don’t see often, and it will be relevant to show how some players evolve their games. Tracking every touch a player gets on the rink should be big for coaching.
In other sports, individual stars are dealt bespoke defences. I talked with Sportsnet’s own Blake Murphy about this in basketball. I asked whether NBA defences tried to get great offensive players their touches in less dangerous areas (thinking this would be relevant in defending great hockey players).
His response:
“Yeah absolutely. The easiest example of it is which way you try to direct a guy at the top of the floor. Like if a defender positions his hips so the ball handler would have to go “over” him, that encourages him to go the other way with an easier path. The Raptors did this a ton to James Harden in the playoffs last year because Harden (a lefty) wants to go left to get into his step-back. Forcing him right costs you a bit if he drives, but it limits his ability to go to his primary move. Teams used to do this to DeMar (DeRozan) like crazy until he improved going left (he’s a righty).
“Another example would be a JJ Redick type who moved without the ball a lot – you can “top lock” him (same idea but basically just angling yourself so he can’t come up above the three-point line). This sacrifices your interior defence because the guy has an easier path to cut to the rim, but teams prefer a Redick type at the rim against a help defender rather than him having a path to 3s. (Same thing goes for Klay Thompson.)”
The idea of a “top lock” is more what I’ve got in mind with hockey.
I understand that hockey is not basketball, as there’s far more chaos and constant movement and unpredictability. But if you’re a team defending the Oilers at 5-on-5, there’s no doubt you could at least have your left winger sag deeper and basically occupy Draisaitl’s ice within that faceoff circle, forcing Edmonton to move the puck up to the point rather than have it in the hands of one of the league’s most dangerous passers. You could cut him off, or at least limit him, and force others to beat you.
In doing some review work on this, several of the league’s better offensive players have respective areas of the ice where they’re more active. Some are similar to Draisaitl, such as Mitch Marner, a right shot who operates out of the left corner, with his stick in the middle. It’s less pronounced, but kind of a mirrored image of how Draisaitl operates.
Some are the opposite, like William Nylander and John Tavares, who get their touches on their strong sides (Nylander is a right shot who gets his touches on the right, Tavares a left shot who gets his on the left). Both David Pastrnak and of course, Ovechkin, prefer the left circle as one-timer guys.
The only players I checked out who truly seemed to have no preferential ice from which to operate in the offensive zone were generational greats: Connor McDavid, Sidney Crosby, and to a lesser extent, Auston Matthews. (The latter uses the whole zone like McDavid and Crosby, though there’s actually a surprising cluster of touches that come behind the net for him. Perhaps that will be a topic for the next “Upon Further Review.”)
I’ll end how I started, with a reminder that having a tendency does not mean the opposition can necessarily stop it, particularly when dealing with an elite skill set like Draisaitl’s.
But these are the things teams sniff out heading into the playoffs in hopes of making life harder on the stars. You may not see those defensive adjustments, but they’re there, and the little changes these bits of information lead to can have significant impacts on who suddenly goes offensively quiet, and in turn, the outcomes of games.