Learning Hockey, a Summer Series: Previously College Hockey 101, Nuts and Bolts 1: Transition Play, Nuts and Bolts 2: Forechecking, Nuts and Bolts 3: Power Plays, Nuts and Bolts 4: Penalty Kills, How to think like a Hockey Scout

Welcome back to the final addition of my 2021 summer series on teaching the finer points of hockey and its strategy. Over the course of this series we've covered the basics of NCAA hockey specifically, looked at strategy when it comes to transition play, forecheck alignments, PP's, and PK's, in addition to talking about how to scout players and what skills scouts look for. For this final post, I've assembled a mailbag by soliciting questions from readers, both through comments on some of my past pieces, as well as this post I threw up on the MGoBoard a week ago. I can't say I got to every question that was asked, but I did my best to respond to the ones that were either most frequently left, or the ones I found most interesting. I've also cited the usernames of who each comment was from (directly quoting in some cases, sometimes paraphrasing). I hope you all agree I did my best to get to as many questions as I could, and that my answers satisfy your desires: 

"How do line changes work?" - Sue 

Let's kick it off with this question. Teams are organized into lines and pairs of skaters: four lines of three forwards and three pairs of two defensemen. When a line or pair goes on the ice, it is referred to as a "shift". Any given shift is only going to last 45 seconds to a minute, typically, and line changes happen during the play in a free flowing manner. Players are rarely called back to the bench by a coach, but rather they have a general sense of timing in their head of when it's time to go for a change. After a long defensive sequence, players are going to be inclined to want to go for a change as soon as the puck leaves the defensive zone. Whenever there's transition play, with the puck either going from the DZ to the OZ or the OZ to the DZ, it's an opportunity for the teams to change. Typically the team with possession will go for a change, with one forward skating it up ice, allowing his defensemen and fellow linemates to go off, and after reinforcements arrive, he, too, will go for a change. 

The coaches keep track of who is on the ice and will let the players on the bench know who is set to go on the ice next when the impending change comes. The best players are going to get more shifts than the lower caliber players as a general rule. When a line change happens during a play, the player exiting skates over to his bench and the player entering the game hops over the bench and onto the ice. However, that exchange can only happen when the player coming off is within five feet of the bench, which gives a little bit of leeway, and there will be a moment when both players are on the ice. The trick is, that neither the player coming off nor the player coming on can touch the puck while the other is on the ice, or that is a too many men on the ice penalty. This is why a warning bell goes off in the head of a hockey coach when the puck caroms towards the bench of his team while the team is in the midst of a change, because if any of the players touch the puck while the mass of bodies are switching, a penalty will be called. 

[AFTER THE JUMP: A lot more questions and answers]

Michigan was a good Corsi team last year [JD Scott]

What is Corsi? What are some other analytics used in hockey? - JonnyHintz

Corsi is to hockey analytics what The Bee Gees were to Disco: the most widely known, entry level concept to the larger genre. Corsi is a pretty simplistic stat that essentially tries to measure possession. It does so by summing up shots on goal, blocked shots, and shots that missed the net, a total that is referred to as Corsi For (CF). Total those same stats up for the opponent, and that's a team's Corsi Against (CA). Thus, Corsi would be CF - CA, while Corsi For% (CF%) is calculated with the following equation: CF / (CF+CA). Thus, CF% is basically a proxy for "what percent of the game did this team possess the puck". A good team is obviously going to possess the puck more than the opposition, so a good team would have a CF% >50%. 

Outside of Corsi, there's a treasure trove of different hockey analytics you could look at. There's Fenwick, which is similar to Corsi, but doesn't include blocked shots. In the NHL, there's a concept called Expected Goals, or xG. It essentially tries to measure how many goals a team should have scored based on the quality of shots that they took in a given game. The calculation of xG is way, way in the weeds and not easy to explain and requires careful shot tracking that didn't begin until the 2007-08 season. The kind of data needed to construct xG models is not tracked at the NCAA level, so unfortunately we don't have that kind of merric for Michigan, unlike Corsi, which is easy to track and widely available in college hockey. I could go on for a long time about all these different stats but most of them only apply to the NHL and this is an NCAA-specific site. 

"How to make myself interested in hockey ... seriously" - TIMMMAAY 

Well, this is a bit difficult for me to answer. I was born into a hockey family. My dad played, several of my cousins played, my brother currently plays (and my dad coaches his team). The Red Wings game was always on at family gatherings if it was any month from October to April. I was just sort of hooked on hockey from a young age because for a lot of hockey families, it's more of a way of life than a hobby. 

I can't really tell you why you should like any particular sport. I can imagine there are a lot of people who read this blog who love soccer. I've never really been a big soccer fan. Different strokes for different folks. What I can tell you is that hockey is fast-paced, physical, and when a good game is roaring, absolutely electrifying. People love playoff hockey for a reason, and the perfect mix of speed, mayhem, and violence that has defined the sport since its inception in Montreal in March of 1875 is still its greatest selling point. Some people will be enthralled, other people won't. But I've found it rewarding enough to devote way too much of my life to obsessively follow it. Maybe you will too. 

At least the tourney gives us cool sights like this [Patrick Barron]

"Me and every other college hockey fan would love to know why the NCAA is dead set on screwing up the post season tournament with their one and done bullshit" - DTOW 

Being able to complain about the NCAA Hockey Tournament is pretty much a must if you want to be an MGoBlog employee or reader, and it's because there's a lot to complain about. Though much of the discourse around the tournament tends to be about the inane decision to hold regional games in empty arenas located in the middle of nowhere, the fundamental problem with the tournament is what this question targets: the one-and-done format. Holding a single elimination hockey tournament to determine a "champion" will yield about as much success as trying to hunt a deer with a plastic spoon. That is, if you presume that the goal of the tournament is to determine who the best team is. Hockey is a highly random sport, determined by random factors (like puck luck) at a higher rate than that of other sports. The Stanley Cup playoffs, with its four round, best 4-out-of-7 format, is only so successful at determining the best team (it gets it right a good amount of the time, though). But a single elimination bracket where a hockey team just needs to win four games against four different teams is almost guaranteed not to crown the "best team" as the champion most all of the time. 

Surprisingly, while the regional site problem is a newer one, the one-and-done format has been in place since the tournament began... in 1948. Back then it was just two games, a semifinals and then a finals to crown a champion. Over time it's grown but the central premise is still there, and as silly as it ever was. My best explanation for why it was designed this way is that they want it to be like the NCAA Basketball Tournament, and that's pretty clear, all the way down to the "Frozen Four" name mimicking the Final Four. They have a formula that is highly successful in one sport and want to copy and paste it to a different sport, but as we all know, it just doesn't work that way. Hockey is a vastly more random sport than basketball. The NCAA Basketball Tournament crowns the "best team" as the champion at pretty decent rates, and even if the truly best team doesn't win, the champion is almost always one of the 5-7 best teams in the country. In the hockey tournament, literally any one of the 16 teams could win, and the odds of the 9th best team of winning aren't that much lower than the odds that the best team wins. That's how hockey works. 

The Canadian Hockey League gets it right. The playoffs for the OHL, QMJHL, and WHL are all best four-out-of-seven series and you have to win four series to win the title, like the NHL. Those playoffs typically take about 6-7 weeks to complete. I get that the NCAA can't afford that much time, but they could easily do four rounds of 3-out-of-5 that takes ~4 weeks to complete and it would be vastly, vastly better. But they don't really care about hockey enough to enact sweeping change, as it's not their main revenue generator. And this is the way they've always done it, and it also helps that NCAA Hockey is more popular now than ever before. In the eyes of the NCAA, if people like Owen Power are leaving Canada to play college hockey in the USA, they must be doing something right, and if it ain't broke don't fix it. 

"How to watch hockey? It's such a quick game that I can sometimes see a play developing but usually I'm just following the puck while glancing around to see where other players are" - mzdmv 

This is an interesting question. I honestly think there are multiple ways to watch hockey and they really hinge on why you're watching the game. If I'm watching the game to see who wins, particularly if I have a rooting interest, I tend to just zoom in on the puck, because that's the focal point of the action. I lose what's going on outside of where the puck is, because I need to know if the guy with the puck is going to shoot or pass. Doing that can be overwhelming for a new viewer, but it's really the only way to watch if you're just getting the hang of things. The more you watch, the more you'll be able to see players developing before they happen (something I can say about myself), but if you're following the puck, you're still going to lose stuff. I'm willing to make that trade off if the game is live and it's a team I care about, but that's not the best way to watch to learn about what's happening. 

If I'm looking to scout a game, then I tend to take my eye off the puck quite a bit. Scanning around the ice frequently to see what's going on everywhere is useful. I like to watch games on replay, with the remote in hand so I'm able to pause if I see something. Or rewind to go back and watch something going on in the corner, while the puck is on the far side of the zone. What you really learn to do, the more you do it, is to pick up on the little things. There are so many small, nuanced events inside a larger hockey game that it's easy to miss. Stick lifts, tight gap control, a slick hold-in at the point, those kinds of things. Sometime they happen around the puck, but if you're looking to see where the puck is going next, you may lose it. I acknowledge that that's a jumble of words that probably don't make a lot of sense, but it's my best advice. 

Can't have hockey without a puck! [Bill Rapai]

"How do they make hockey pucks?" - East Quad 

I actually had no idea before writing this piece, but based on the research I did, the answer is mostly "machines". Like much manufacturing nowadays, it's a highly automated process with machines who are mechanically designed to fulfill each task (I don't look forward to the day when Brian automates my job with a HAL-9000 supercomputer programmed to talk about hockey). Pucks are made of vulcanized rubber, stretched into long sheets of material (made up of ~20 compounds) that are then cut into small globs and subsequently pressed into the puck shape. After they gain the puck shape, they are printed with whatever insignias they should have depending on if they are going to be used by the NCAA, NHL, whatever. Here's a short video showing the process, which was submitted by reader mgoblue0970, featuring a tough-looking Quebecois man explaining his factory and a different man who handles the printing of the pucks speaking with a delightful Canadian accent ("PRO-cess"): 

"I don’t understand whether drafted players have already played for Michigan or will play for Michigan or both" - Cam

This can be a bit confusing, so I understand why the question was asked. The NHL operates a little bit differently than the NBA, in that you can play in college after you've been drafted, so long as you haven't signed an NHL contract. The team that drafts you holds your NHL rights until you either sign or decline a contract. The players eligible for any NHL Draft run from January 1 of the year 20 years before that of the draft, and September 15 of the year 18 years before that of the draft. So, for example, the 2021 NHL Draft included all players born between January 1, 2001, and September 15, 2003. Though some players are drafted as overagers, the vast majority will be picked in their age 18 year, which functionally means that the bulk of the players picked in the 2021 NHL Draft were born between September 16, 2002, and September 15, 2003. It's a concrete and well-established system, but it also doesn't jibe with how education sometimes works. 

Most players are going to be drafted in that window, the same year they're graduating HS. Let's say for the sake of argument I was an elite NHL prospect (I absolutely was not): my birthday is February 6, so I would have been drafted in the summer of the year that I turned 18. If I were planning to play college hockey at Michigan, I would have graduated HS, been drafted, and then suited up at Michigan. Thus, most all players on the Michigan Hockey team who are pro prospects have already been drafted. For example, Cam York is a January 5, 2001 birthday. He was picked in the 2019 NHL Draft at age 18 after graduating HS, and then played for Michigan for the first time that fall, after already having been drafted. That's normal for most all players.  

However, some children born after September 15 are sent to Kindergarten at age 4, ahead of their fifth birthday. That means those kids graduate HS at age 17 and then are ready to enroll in college, but because they are born after September 15, they are not eligible for the draft in the calendar year that they turn 18. In theory, these should be rare cases, but Michigan has had four of them in recent memory, including THREE on this current team: Owen Power (Nov. 22), Kent Johnson (Oct. 18), and Matty Beniers (Nov. 5). Quinn Hughes was an Oct. 14 birthday, so he also fell into this group. Thus in the case of these players, they suited up for Michigan for a year before they were drafted.

Basically, the vast majority of Michigan Hockey players play for Michigan after they've been drafted (assuming they will be drafted), but if they happen to have October, November, or December birthdays AND they come to Michigan directly out of HS, they will play one season at Michigan before being drafted. I hope that clears it up. 

"What do players do to get kicked out of the face off circle?" - mgobob 

The simple answer is they "do something to gain an unfair advantage in the faceoff". The complex answer is that most of the time we don't know. Sometimes it has to do with lining up incorrectly (stick needs to be on the edge of the dot, feet need to be in the stirrups, skates need to be straightforward). Other times it's encroachment, or trying to win the puck too early, before it's dropped. Players will try to anticipate, and get a head-start before the puck is dropped, but the referee may not have dropped it and will catch the antsy behavior. The referee will say to the player why they have been kicked out of the circle for an infraction, but that is rarely conveyed to the audience, so most all of the time, we don't really know what happened. 

"Set plays. I've heard of "Umbrella" and know there are others. When are they used? Are they called by the coach or a player on the ice? Are they specifically called after a time-out?" - Bronco648

So first off, Umbrella is a power play formation that we actually discussed in my PP strategy article that you can read here. As for set plays, they aren't really called, except maybe out of a timeout off a faceoff. What tends to happen is that they pop up situationally. For example, a team might practice that once a puck is retrieved off a dump-in, a winger cuts to the slot and the player retrieving the puck is supposed to put the puck into the slot to find him (MSU ran a play like this against Michigan last season). So the players know that when they go to retrieve a dump-in, it's time to run that play. 

Hockey practicing/strategy is really all about situational stuff. Teams have their overarching strategies (systems), which we discussed in my articles, and then they'll have derivatives that they practice within those systems. They may practice how to execute a 2-on-1 specifically (maybe the coach doesn't want lots of passing back-and-forth), or how to play in the offensive zone. Those inform the plays that will arise situationally, and it's all about being able to identify the situation when it pops up. Once you identify the situation, then you should know what the coach wants you to do here. And that's about as common as "set plays" really are in hockey, because you don't have the coach in your ear telling you to run Red 12. 

Where you go when you commit a penalty [Patrick Barron]

Penalties Explanation!

This is basically like four questions I received consolidated into one. People asked in various ways about what different penalties (particularly the violent ones) look like and why some penalties don't seem to be called in the playoffs. I will tackle the second half of that question later, but let's start with a quick run through of kinds of penalties: 

• Cross-checking: When you take the stick horizontally with two hands and then hit an opponent with it. Generally whether a penalty is called comes down to the severity fo the hit and where the hit was administered (normally it's to a player's back). 
• Boarding: Occurs when a player hits another player violently, smushing them against the boards. Mostly gets called when there's a big hit to an opponent's back that forces that player to go face-first into the boards. 
• Interference: When you attempt to inhibit the movement of another player while making no attempt to play the puck (normally because the person you're going after doesn't have the puck). 
• Roughing: This penalty typically is given out when there's a scrum after the whistle that doesn't arise to the level of a real fight. Sometimes it can be given out for a hit that is particularly violent while a play is going on. The first 30 seconds of this clip shows an altercation where roughing penalties were given out to involved players. 
• Charging: You don't see this one much anymore, but it is essentially when a player takes a long path to hit someone or leaps into a hit. In rule books it's often defined as taking an "excessive distance" to go for a hit. A way to penalize someone for wanting bloodlust as oppose to hitting for a purpose. 
• Slashing: When you swing your stick to hack the other player. Could be slashing his stick, or slashing his body. This penalty is pretty common, and it's one of the ways to inhibit a player about to take a dangerous shot. 
• Tripping: Exactly as it sounds. When you use your body or stick to trip up an opponent and bring them down. Also very common. 

I hope that proved reasonably useful. Now let's talk about why some penalties don't get called much in playoff hockey. This is actually a huge debate that the NHL is having about refereeing since the Tim Peel incident happened. Referees in hockey are generally programmed with the notion that they shouldn't "decide the game". Basically the idea that people don't want to watch penalties get called all the time, and so referees should not call that many in a given game. Moreover, they also believe that penalties should never be terribly lopsided towards one team, because then fans can claim the game was "rigged" and that it was decided by the referees giving one team all the power plays. So, referees make a strong effort to limit the number of penalties that are called, and more or less make sure that each team gets the same number of penalties, so as to keep the game "fair".

That thought process gets ratcheted up to 1000 in the playoffs, and so very few penalties are called and the refs will make sure that the same number are assessed to each team. If one team has had 3 power plays and the other team has had 0, you can bet your life savings that the next power play is going to the team that hasn't had any, because you'll win the bet every time. And once a playoff game goes into OT, basically no penalties will be called, because again, referees are programmed not to "decide the game" and handing a team a PP in a sudden death OT can often be a pretty quick way to decide a game. If a penalty gets called in OT, it's because something REALLY obvious and egregious happened. 

Of course, the logical rebuttal to this is that by virtue of not calling penalties as they happen, referees are deciding the game. Much of the notion that physical teams do better in the playoffs dates to the fact that physicality goes up in the playoffs without consequences, because penalties won't be called on it. Teams can whack, slash, and hack the opponents without the real fear of penalties, especially in an OT situation, which can favor teams with more brutish players, and it hurts the teams with more skill and speed, which is why some have come to criticize this model of officiating. 

I want to emphasize that officiating in hockey (really at all levels in North America) is like this because this is how we have collectively decided we wanted it to be. Especially in the NHL, when penalties aren't called in OT, it's not because the referees are bad at their job or missed their latest optometry appointment, it's because the league has told them not to call penalties in OT. What I always say to people who complain about hockey refereeing is that if you think people whining about officiating is bad now, wait until one team is getting 9 power plays in a game and the other team gets 2. Fans are always complaining about games being rigged against their favorite team, and the NHL has decided that the best way to keep the referees out of the cross fire as much as possible is just to more or less ensure that both teams get equal PP chances and that's the end of it. It's their way of taking their thumb off the literal scale as much as possible, yet as we discussed, it still leaves a pretty big fingerprint on the game. It's a tricky debate, and I don't have an answer. All I'll say is I have supreme respect for anyone who attempts to referee a game as physical and fast-paced as hockey because I know damn well I couldn't do it.