This is from Jack Han’s Hockey Tactics book that catalogs every team’s tactics each year. They are based off of last year, but since we’re having many of the same problems that we had last year, we can assume that they haven’t changed much if anything at all.
The one thing that stood out to me most that I wanted to draw attention to is our defensive zone coverage. It is *dictated by our system* that our defensemen both drop below the goal line to go after a puck in the corner. As a trash beer league/dek hockey defenseman, it boggles my mind that our coach schemes to have our defensemen leave the front of the net . It’s fine when Nico is on, as he’s pretty much a defenseman playing forward, but maybe having the F2 support in the corner and cycling the D2, F1, and F3 one spot over would help our defensive coverage?
I’m just spitballing, but I thought you guys would find this interesting. Feel free to discuss.
4 comments
Hmm this is interesting, seems to take a positive tone and stick to the pros of the system rather than bring up the glaring downsides of a high pressure offensive system. Ruff’s system also increases odd man rushes against, defensive zone struggles where over committing to puck battles in the corner leaves someone open in front, and making riskier outlet passes trying to push the tempo instead of chipping pucks off the board to clear the zone and reset.
I get why people outside the fan base want the Devils to be good. They play a really fun, high scoring (for both teams) game. Unfortunately, no matter what they try to change with the rules defense still wins championships, and now that all the teams have seen our system, they are planning for it. This means the boys have to work even _harder_ to win the races against players who know what we’re trying to do.
With our current roster of D-men and goalies we’re going to have a really hard time winning consistently under Ruff’s system. We need around 4 goals per game on average to win, which is not sustainable.
I stopped reading after “relies on creating shot volume” in the first picture since they’re almost all allergic to shooting the puck
even with this though, statistically the defense has been *good enough*, now absolutely there have been brain farts that exacerbate the weaknesses in Ruff’s system, but its the goaltending that has been coming up short lately.
1-2-2 won’t work without Nico just saying haula can pull it off other then that we need to make space