On today’s SHORT SHIFTS episode, Toph wants to talk about one of the biggest kesy to our game - puck protection!
TEN MINUTES STARTING NOW!
We appreciate every listen, download, comment, rating and share on your social sites!
The Hockey Think Tank Podcast
SHORT SHIFTS - PUCK PROTECTION
(upbeat music) Here we go with another short shifts episode. 10 minutes are on the clock. Jeffrey J. Hu, GMBM LeVecchio has no idea what the topic is gonna be. I am Tovarskott, I am your captain on this magic carpet ride. Jeffrey, my co-pilot, are you ready for your topic? - Double dare, yeah. - You had double dog dare me? - Let's get it. - I wanna talk about puck protection today, brother. I wanna talk about puck protection. Puck protection is one of the most important skills I believe that you can have as a player and as a big, strapping young man like yourself. Puck protection was probably a strength of yours. And so with that, we'd love to pick your brain and have you talk to our listeners a little bit about the importance of puck protection, why it's important, and also some tips of the trade that you used to use when you're protecting the puck back when you were playing. - Use the boards as your friend. Use the boards, the boards have a little bit of give depending on the rink, but if you're out from the boards and you go to turn and twist your body like a cutback as a D-man's hitting you, and if you're too far from the boards, when they hit you, you're gonna fall into the boards and you don't have now your chest over your hips, which means you're off balance, much harder to use your stick to keep the puck away from their stick, much harder to make any type of play. And if you're cutting and they get any type of piece of you and you fall forward, you don't have the boards to bounce off of. So learning how to like, as you're down low and you're turning and you're slipping and you're moving, learning how to like absorb a hit and rotate in a way where a lot of young players think that they need to keep control of the puck as they're spinning, but as you're spinning and puck protecting and cutting back, if you're stick handling and the puck is right there, it's way harder to absorb a hit, roll off and then move your feet out of a cutback versus if you kind of learn how, and this is just through repetition in practice and in games, learning how close to the boards, you wanna spin, letting them hit you because when a D-man goes to hit you down low, almost always, they're gonna lean towards you, which means now their chest is over their hips, or not over their hips, it's over the front. Now they're not balanced on their skates. So if you rotate as they're leaning in to hit you and you are closer to the boards and you kind of slingshot yourself off the boards as you rotate, you don't even have to hold on to the puck, you can just put it in a little bit of an area where they can't get to it, you bounce off the boards and it slingshots you the opposite way. It literally, I didn't have a lot of skill at the higher levels, but I was really good at being slippery in the corners despite being 6'2 between 202 and 217, I played at and pro of Twisted Steel and Sex appeal, what's up? Using the boards as my friend and then pop up one, two, three quick strides out of a rotation, but I would bait D-man, I would get separation so that then they would have just skate faster towards me, towards the corner, skating away from them, and then I would slow down, let them get closer right as I knew they were about to hit me, I'd let my body get close to the board so I could do this rotation, have them slip off me, use the boards as a slingshot and get moving. For me, that was like my move. It was, and then I would just drive the net like a meat head and just hope one of my teammates who had skill was following me to get a rebound, like that's what I did all the time, but knowing where you are, spatial awareness, how much space and time I have, how far away from the boards I am, is there a second wave defender playing like second quick, 'cause then if you rotate and you turn right into him, that doesn't help, you're gonna get the puck taken away from you, so you gotta know where you are in space and time and you have to know how to rotate, be slippery, and use the boards as a slingshot. - Use the board as a slingshot. - Have to, dude, that changed my career when I learned that. Like literally, that was huge for me. - Yeah, you can use the board to your advantage so much. - Oh my God, man. Like, it's that, I don't know when I, I think I probably learned that in juniors. I feel like I started really being good at cutting back down low in the USHL because I wasn't skilled enough to play like in the open ice, so I would get it down low into the corners, get there first, and then just play below the goal line as much as I could. - Well, it's, I mean, it's one of the things that like, when you really dive into the details at like the NHL level when it comes to some of this stuff, one of the things a lot of those development skill coaches are working on is using the wall to help you shade, protect the puck because like if you're doing a cutback and you're kind of close to the wall and you gotta cut back towards the wall, like that could be a tricky place to be in because there's not a lot of time in space. So what they're doing and also it helps you to, once you do do your cutback, you're going the other way this much quicker. So like you bounce it off the wall, like bounce the puck off the wall and then you're doing a cutback without the puck but you're also shielding the puck with your skates and with your body and then you're able to make that next play or get out of that spin a lot quicker. And so you see it all the time, like if you watch, like literally like if you watch some NHL games now and you see some of this stuff going on, watch how much the players with the puck use the wall when they're shielding it all the time. And like, so like say I'm gonna go in, I'm going towards the boards, like I'm very close to the boards, I'm letting that D man get close to me, throwing one like head fake to the right, knowing I wanna go left. Like if I feel him a little bit on my left side, throwing a head fake to the right, like moving my shoulders to the right, maybe even twisting my hips, make it 'cause like he's reading your body language, you gotta know that, play chess, not checkers, don't do one thing, show and then go. So I'm gonna show him, I'm gonna turn right. So now he's moving off my left hip, more to my center mass. And then as I'm getting the boards, I'm not even like holding onto the puck, I'm moving the puck into a little bit of an area close to me, right now don't have to worry about losing the puck by stick handling it. And I can kind of use my stick to hit theirs, I rotate, I let them hit my back as I'm turning, I already got them to bite on the right, I'm rotating left as they hit your back because you rotated your shoulders. If you're watching this on YouTube, you can see what I'm doing here. I rotated my shoulders this way, now because my shoulders are here, they hit my middle of my back and they're gonna go to the right, which bounces me off the boards and I can take off to the left. Like show one way, go the other, but you have to suck them in. If you do it too early and they have space between you and your back and I go fake right, turn left, if they're like three feet away, they're just gonna watch you do a fake on nobody and you're gonna turn right into you getting murdered. So like you gotta make sure that space and time, you understand where are they, where am I trying to go, where's the boards, where is the place to kind of push the puck to a safe area where I don't have to like stick handle it and I can just shield it more of. - Yeah, and it kind of comes down to like understanding and recognizing where the pressure is coming from. And you do that number one by shoulder checking and scanning. Like that's the first thing you have to understand where they're at, but what you said is like, you can also put the defender in a position where you want them to pressure you this way based on the deception that you use, what you're just talking about was deception. And then boom, I go the other way. There was not like a lot more gratifying of a feeling as a forward than like doing a cut back and beating a guy off the floor. - Oh my God, bro. - It's like, oh my God. - Literally my favorite thing was taking the puck on purpose, going to the goalie's glove side, a traditional glove side, because I personally was way better cutting back to my backhand. So I would-- - I think everybody. - I'm sure, I'm sure most guys are. So I would purposely like get the puck around the net and I would skate to the corner. Like I was gonna skate up the wall, wait for them, throw up, throw a fake to the right like I'm going up and then like, I'm like, yeah, I'm sucking you in you dummy. Come on, follow me, follow me dummy. Oh, close that gap. Oh, see ya, like again, play chess, not checkers. Like have a plan of how you're gonna disguise what you wanna do, make them try to do something that helps you in what you wanna do next. - Yeah, so little tangible things here too, 'cause we only got a minute left. I think what you talked about earlier is once you protect the puck and you get away, like those quick three steps are so incredibly important. - Creating separation. - It's creating separation exactly from the defender. Also like, play low. The lower you play, the more or the better of a center of gravity you're gonna have, the more power you're gonna have in your cutbacks and your ability to get away from that defender. The other thing is like, find a way to like use your shoulder and your hip to shield off the player and also get your hands away from your body. Like get your hands away from your body 'cause then that gives so much more area where the defender has to like go to have to poke check it off your stick. So like playing low, using your shoulder and your hips to kind of shield off and then extending your hands to make it even more difficult for that person to take it off your stick. I think those things are really important too. So stick your butt out, stick your butt out because it gives you a better tripod base to be balanced also. - Yep, hockey players got big butts 'cause we skate a lot. We use those muscles, don't be afraid to use them. - Use them, boots, baby. Share the show. Share the show. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)
On today’s SHORT SHIFTS episode, Toph wants to talk about one of the biggest kesy to our game - puck protection!
TEN MINUTES STARTING NOW!
We appreciate every listen, download, comment, rating and share on your social sites!