Puck management sure to be a talking point in Toronto

Travis Yost

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The term “managing the puck” certainly deserves a place on the Mount Rushmore of NHL coach speak. And for good reason. Hockey is a game where proper decision making – knowing when to take risks and knowing when to play it conservatively – is a huge driver of individual and team success.

Puck management will be a common theme in every NHL market this year, but it may be the most pronounced in Toronto. The Maple Leafs are legitimate Stanley Cup contenders heading into the 2018-19 season, armed with perhaps the league’s most potent offence. But they are not a team without flaws. The blueline is still young and relatively inexperienced, and when Mike Babcock’s team struggled last season it usually involved failures emanating from the defensive zone.

Toronto’s opening preseason game felt like a microcosm of what to expect this season. The game started with defenceman Travis Dermott failing to get the puck out from behind the Toronto net. Centre Nazem Kadri was able to recover the puck, but immediately turned it back over to Sens forward Matt Duchene. Seconds later, Ottawa’s Ryan Dzingel put the puck in the back of the net. The ugly sequence was erased with time as the Leafs scored four consecutive goals and cruised to victory.

Toronto will get away with that stuff against most teams due to the sheer degree of talent they have throughout the lineup. But against the better teams – most notably Boston and Tampa Bay in the division – the margin of error is much lower. One critical mistake there could mean the difference between victory and defeat.

Since Toronto is returning most of their group from last year, I thought it would be interesting to take a look at the skaters more prone to turnovers by area of the ice. Turnovers, like most events, are logged in the play-by-play data and have appropriate x/y coordinates. From there we can see not only the players more prone to coughing the puck up, but also the areas in which these turnovers occur.

One caveat: giveaway/takeaway data can vary from arena to arena, but, directionally speaking it will provide us better understanding of who is looser with the puck.

Here’s what last season looked like at even strength, defencemen first:

I have long been excited about Dermott’s future in Toronto – his skating ability and north/south puck movement are made for the modern era of hockey. That said, it’s probably fair to say his first 37 games as an NHL player were a bit of a learning experience, particularly in the defensive third. Having high turnover rates aren’t necessarily bad in a vacuum, because sometimes they can be indicative of a player who is trying to take more chances to jump-start an ice transition and feed the attack. But if you look at other high-end defenders around the league, you realize this number is almost certainly too high. For frame of reference: Brent Burns (2.3 per-60), Victor Hedman (1.8 per-60), and Drew Doughty (1.7 per-60).

On the other side of the coin you have Roman Polak and Connor Carrick. Polak is your prototypical defensive zone player – he saw a ton of shift starts in front of the Toronto net and he generally saw tougher, more offence-oriented competition. So, at least in part, his low turnover rates aren’t surprising. Polak rarely had the puck on his stick when he was in the defensive zone and when he did, he probably made the safer play to clear the zone. The NHL doesn’t record defensive zone clears as turnovers, but if they did you would imagine that Polak’s rate would be much higher. Still, this is probably one of the reasons why Babcock loved him during his time in Toronto. (He is now a member of the Dallas Stars.)

I was interested by Carrick’s low rates here though more than anything else. Carrick shows up as a bit of a safe player but it’s important to note that his style of play did get results last season.

With Carrick on the ice, Toronto averaged 2.7 goals per-60 minutes last year – definitely on the lower end for a Toronto team that averaged about 3.0 goals per-60 minutes over the course of the season. But defensively, Carrick only yielded 2.2 goals against per-60 minutes, comfortably beating the Toronto average of 2.6. In summary, Carrick’s 55 per cent goal rate was second only to the offensively minded Dermott and sixth best on the team. It’s definitely something to keep an eye on heading into 2018-19.

Let’s wrap up by taking a glance at the forward group:

Not surprisingly, forwards as a group have a substantially lower turnover rate in the defensive zone. That’s largely because bluelines do the heavy lifting to get the puck out. I do think Auston Matthews is interesting here, though.

If you watch some tape on Matthews you’ll see that he has a propensity to skate deep into the defensive third to retrieve pucks. That might be a sensible strategy, but I think it leaves him a little bare when playing against the quality of competition that he tends to get. At the very least it makes him more vulnerable to a turnover. And like I mentioned earlier with Dermott, turnovers aren’t necessarily bad – you want the puck on Matthews’ stick a ton and with that comes a higher volume of miscues. That’s the reality that any elite player deals with.

Puck management will definitely be something to watch for the Leafs this season. It’s certainly a targeted area of improvement for the club and I’m guessing we’ll hear quite a bit about it when the team struggles.

Cleaning up puck control, especially in and around the Maple Leafs’ net, would certainly go a long way in increasing their chances of a deep playoff run.