Puck Pressure and how to deal with it.
Pressuring pucks in all areas of the rink has a massive impact on a team’s turnover ratio. This Dallas Stars forecheck is a great example of puck pressure and its physical characteristic is quality skating. Nuanced speed, movement pattern execution, take-away skill, competitiveness and break out anticipation are all KPI’s of quality checking.
Pressure. And lots of it. I couldn’t help but notice Dallas’ forecheck, their big boys set the standard, guys like Benn, Seguin, and Hintz we’re noticeable at pressuring the puck. When we talk about skill development at Perfect Skating, we talk about a paradigm shift in the overall way we train players. It first started with our philosophy of Movement. Skill. Map. Transfer. Our company’s leadership is focused on human optimization of hockey athletes. In order to transfer that optimization to games we need to look a new shift in skill development preparation. We can’t just let that out of the bag quite yet, but it’s in our testing phase and it’s spiked our current development model by over 50%. Man, that’s ROI. It feels great to be part of such a progressive conservative organization.
So, if puck pressure is so important, how do you achieve it? And more importantly can you prepare against it? I think the first one at a fundamental level is your player’s ability to skate. Yes, skating again. And it’s not going to change. The game has moved to an ultimate speed game where now guys like Milan Lucic can hardly play in today’s NHL. The key to establishing puck pressure a layer down from the fundamental is a player’s ability to have a checking mindset. That means thinking without the puck. Think about it. What do you see in rinks all over the hundreds of cities and towns across North America when it comes to skill development? Mindless skill through apparatus. It’s crazy, we are teaching our kids to be robots. While our ancestors learned the game instinctually through experiential development on the frozen ponds, our generation thinks we are better by pre-programming our youth into a robotic state of non-consciousness? Make any sense to you? Certainly not to me. This is why our programming at PS doesn’t involve apparatus. We use real world examples of situations to isolate areas of performance increase. Our coach is the apparatus. It moves, it dictates, it reacts. That’s how you can affect pre-prep for pressure. That’s how you learn to deal with it. The other key aspect layering in skating development is let’s call it checking skating. In a checking mindset, the athlete is continuously processing angles, speed, and radius of ice needed to be an effective checker. These are all thought processes without the puck. And it’s without the puck that this generation of hockey athlete lacks the most.
I recently watched the Antoine Griezmann documentary on Netflix, it’s a great story, I highly recommend it. It’s a great story of hope, perseverance but for athletic performance it’s crucial. Here is a player that the French evaluated only physically. They looked at his size, his speed, his endurance and his technical ball skills. The problem? He wasn’t extremely gifted in those areas and French club after French club released him to an almost quitting point. But all good things come to pass if we continuously believe in them. So, along came the Spaniards who evaluated players completely differently. Their number 1 criteria was a player’s ability to process the play. They evaluated a player’s mind. Everything else, they could physically develop. The rest is history. Antoine Greizmann capped off 2018 winning the World Cup as the star player of the French side and is considered one of the top 5 players in the world. Just awesome.
So, want to pressure the puck like a champ? Work on your skating. But work on it in a deliberate setting where your thinking to be like a great checker. Work on various patterns in various situations that allow you to process radius, angles and speeds so that you can be an effective puck pressure player. The layer to deal with it? You’ve got to train real world competency so that your brain can map the situational pressure. Working in a development program that understands only fundamental skill is only going to get you fundamentally adept. That’s step 1 over a myriad of development protocols needed to be humanly optimized hockey player. A humanly optimized hockey player… I like the sound of that. Now, GO FIND it, FOR YOU!
