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Thursday, July 31, 2014

Progress

This is a post I've been wanting to write for a long time. And in the time I've been waiting, I've been making more and more progress, making the delay even worse by adding more material to my mental notes (if not the actual content of this post) about how far I've come since the last time I wrote about my progress in anything hockey-skills-related.

Part of the trouble has been wondering how to write about my progress without saying the same thing all the time and turning this blog into a space that sounds more like those stock answer interviews lots of professional athletes give. There is progress I've made, but a lot of it has been incremental and probably would only be noticeable after a long time. It's been a long time since I've actually learned to do something new. There are certainly still things I can learn, but in the limited situations I've put myself in with hockey clinics, scrimmages, and sticktimes, I've been able to hold my own with what I can do. Now it's just a matter of things like skating faster and handling the puck better.

It's been a long time since I've worked on my skating. I can still do things like pivot from backwards to forwards and switch directions, but those and a lot of the more complex skills have deteriorated a bit. There's less fluidity in my backwards skating, especially my back crossovers. There's almost no more fluidity to my transitions from forwards to backwards. I also feel like my top speed has gone down a bit, but I still feel pretty swift on the ice. I need to be more conscious of my knee bend, and maybe that'll help my speed. My tight turns are still pretty putrid, but they're probably the one skating skill that's improved a bit in the time since my last post about my actual skills.

My skating is still suffering a bit as well from the skate size disparity between my right and left skates. There's a little bit of space in my left boot which has been affecting my skating ever since I started doing turns and crossovers. If my highest priority purchase in terms of hockey equipment is a new hockey stick, properly fitting skates is a very close second. There's also the possibility of baking my skates, but I'll have to look more into it to see if it'll actually conform to my left foot and close the space in the toe that gets really annoying when trying to grip the ice for turns and back crossovers.

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There's been a huge metamorphosis in my philosophy of what kind of player I want to be. I still feel most comfortable playing as a defenseman despite my obvious shortcomings in terms of size and puck skills. When I played intramural hockey at Brown, especially in my first season, I hardly ever made good plays or decisions with the puck. I always just tried to make sure there weren't any breakaways against us (which is partially why I hardly ever skated beyond the red line because the puck was always coming back into our zone) and break up plays the other team was trying to make. I was mildly successful in that endeavor, but the whole operation broke down every time I got possession of the puck. I turned it over, and whoops, time to play more defense.

There's a slight sense of irony to this change in my attempt at growth. Anti-stats people have often decried the hockey analytics movement because of many straw-man-ish reasons, but the overall insight has proved so valuable to me. The Red Army teams of the Soviet Union and the Detroit Red Wings of the '90s (of Russian Five fame) prided themselves on puck possession, and doing dogged work to get it back when they didn't have it. Recent work into correlations of possession metrics like Corsi and Fenwick have shown that the most successful teams in the NHL have players who are the best at keeping possession of the puck. How am I going to improve my game? I have to--HAVE TO--get better at handling the puck, making plays with it, and getting it back when I don't have it.

I've made a conscious effort to get better at handling passes. The worst night of hockey for me skill-wise was my first practice session with the Brown club team. The first drill of the night: skate goal line to opposite blue line, turn, get a pass, shoot on the goalie. I could keep up with the pace of the skating, even if my lack of conditioning showed by the end of the drill (which was the first of the night, so you can imagine how the rest of the night went). My turning wasn't great, but it wasn't specifically a tight turn thing, so I could curl around the faceoff dot outside the blue line.

Get a pass? Pffft.

They started out feeding me hard passes which I predictably missed every single time. I took maybe one shot because a puck happened to be in line with where I was skating. When they saw I was struggling, they eased up a bit. Still failed. The last pass I got of the drill was literally a pity pass given at such a slow pace just to make sure I couldn't screw up handling it.

I overskated it.

It's been almost a year since that night, and since then, especially since the summer started, I've tried as best I could to get better at handling passes. Like the linked Bourne article mentions, I want to become a player that you can't give a bad pass to. Lofty for sure, and I still don't quite know how to handle passes in my skates, but I'm much better at handling passes on my forehand. Backhand needs work but is miles better than it ever has been. You give the puck to me, I want to make sure the play continues toward the opposing net.

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I've made a conscious effort to improve my decision-making once the puck is on my stick. I used to always do one of two things: fire a hope pass which usually ended up in a turnover; or dump the puck across the next line, whether it was out of our zone or below the opponent's goal line. Part of that was me trying to "play within myself" because I really didn't have much hockey skill to speak of. The safest thing to do is the dump the puck toward the opponent's end, right? It's what NHLers with little skill do, so why shouldn't I do it too?

There are obviously several problems with that approach. The first and most egregious is that when I got the puck, I always missed out on using my best skill: my skating. The play literally died when the puck got on my stick. I didn't know what to do with it, and I was always flat-footed because, hurr durr, I apparently can't skate with a puck on my stick. The second is that constantly dumping the puck in or just firing it somewhere into space and hoping someone on my team gets it requires no on-ice intelligence and prevents me from actually developing the skills needed to get better at making plays. I suck at making passes and refusing to pass the puck competently (or at least trying to) means I won't get better at it. Even if I keep my head up (something I'm getting better at doing), just blindly dumping the puck means I'm not attempting to read a play or find an open teammate. Third is that I never develop any puck skills, so my stickhandling suffers as a result. The former approach literally stunts my hockey growth.

There's still work to do, as there always will be, but I'm proud to say I'm light-years ahead of where I was before. There are still times when just flat out clearing the zone or dumping the puck is warranted, and I'm getting better at recognizing those. My stickhandling is improving, and I can competently skate the puck without overskating it or losing it by overhandling it. In fact, I scored a goal in a clinic scrimmage a few weeks ago because I skated the puck along the boards and went end-to-end with it. (Full disclosure: There was a lot of luck involved as well.) I'm passing the puck and starting breakouts more often than ever. I still need to work on the pace of my decision-making, especially in the neutral zone, because I take too much time there and I end up losing the puck or making a dumb pass. As well, my actual passing is improving too. I've made several successful saucer passes when I could barely get the puck up off the ice before. I've made hard passes across large swaths of the ice to spring my teammates in on the rush.

The hidden externality of all this progress is that my confidence on the ice is higher than ever. There are always people better than I am on the ice, so I don't ever need a reminder of my place on the hockey-skill totem pole, but knowing I'm capable of doing some things competently is worlds ahead of where I was the last time I played in an organized league. I wish I had started earlier so I could play a third and fourth year of intramural hockey, but I'm confident (once I get other life issues sorted out) I'll be able to find a rec league I can mesh in and learn a lot from. Until then, there's plenty more to work on, and I finally feel capable of reaching certain skill plateaus and improving my actual hockey skills.

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