On February 3rd’s practice, we focused on an important but often-forgotten habit: skating to the puck. Many adult and youth players develop the habit of backing away from the puck carrier as they try to get open and wait for a pass.

This works fine if there is little-to-no pressure and the passing lanes are open.

Unfortunately, in real hockey games, outside of odd-man-rush situations, this is an unlikely scenario. What ends up happening is, the puck carrier inevitably gets pressured, and they go into puck protection mode. This creates 2 “truths”:

1. Regardless of how much open space you have around you, you aren’t a viable passing option until the puck carrier wins their battle
2. You cannot help the puck carrier win their battle from a distance

This is when we, the player(s) without the puck, need to consider skating to the puck, generally along the perimeter of the ice or zone we’re playing in (farther away from defense than the puck carrier as it is less contested). This generally results in one of two things:

1. You are skating along the perimeter of the ice toward the puck carrier, and the puck carrier is skating away from you. This sets up for a potential cycle pass along the boards.
2. You are skating along the perimeter of the ice toward the puck carrier, and the puck carrier is skating towards you. This results in a criss-cross and causes the defender to consider: Are they going to drop pass? Or not? I can’t defend both directions at once.

We’ll go deeper into the strategy of skating to the puck in subsequent sessions, but to begin with we focused on some skills that allow it to happen.

Skills Development Drill 1: Exiting stops and tight turns with cross-overs

This drill had us skating around cones, with a puck, followed by a high-speed open-carry (puck on backhand) and a shot on net.

As skating to the puck requires the ability to quickly change direction and move quickly and laterally across the ice, our focus was on proper technique of 2 skills:

1. Stop & crossover start
   • Balancing our weight distribution between both feet for a more efficient stop
   • Scissoring our feet for a wider, more stable stance
   • “Sitting into” the stop and leveraging our legs like springs to propel us in the opposite direction
   • Exiting the stop with two crossover strides then into forward skating
2. Tight turn exited with crossovers
   • Scissoring our feet for a wider, more stable turn
   • Weight slightly on our heels for more bite into the ice, and a quicker turn
   • Only using the tight turn for 1/2 to 2/3rds of our total turn path – immediate transition to crossovers to build more speed toward our next objective

Skills Development Drill 2: Double Criss-Cross Drop Passing

I like the double-drop pass drill more than the single-drop pass drill because it places greater emphasis on, while in the offensive zone, having to quickly change direction (using our tight turns exited with crossovers) and skate to the puck for the second drop-pass to happen.

In this drill, we continued to work on our skating technique while also emphasizing the need to skate further along the outside path vs. the puck carrier, and the proper drop pass.

Skills Development Drill 3: 2v1 with Gap Control

In this drill, we set up a 2v1 working on 2 skills for the forwards and 2 skills for the defender:

Forward:

1. Driving with speed to draw the defender deeper into the zone
2. Leveraging the drop pass to the trailer

Defender:

1. Gap control or closing the gap – not waiting for the attacker to “hit you” at full speed
2. Angling the attacker wide (to a less dangerous area) with proper body positioning and active stick

Next practice we’ll continue with 2v1 scenarios (ie. drive the net instead of drop-pass) and potentially layer on another game-like situation into our 2v1, like a breakout (timing TBD).