After a year of tracking 60 games of zone entries and exits with the Kings, perhaps we have not reviewed or highlighted the data enough.
This data is very interesting when put in front of you and you start theorycrafting and breaking into it in more detail. Along with video review, analysis, and a review of these numbers, you can get an excellent idea of system, approach, and individual player proclivity and perhaps direction.
We have highlighted zone exits quite a bit in different player highlights, team and individual breakdowns, and bits and pieces here and there.
What we have really not dug into is the zone ENTRY data.
Zone entries and exits are quickly becoming a new area of emphasis with the analytics community. Why? Because it takes our basic concepts of possession based metrics and asks in another way: "What are you doing with that possession?"
Whereas expected goals and scoring chance data give us a good idea of where shots are coming from and how dangerous Player A might be compared to Player B in the attacking zone, we have no real way to know who does what in the neutral zone. That is, without watching every game and taking feverish notes.
The neutral zone can be the death of many games and many teams. Teams fail to traverse the neutral zone, defenses pack the neutral zone in an effort to disrupt, and sometimes the blue line might as well be a walled fortification.
However, through analysis of data, we can find players who excel at certain aspects, be it pass, carry, or dump. We can find out that Anze Kopitar is really good at passing the puck into the zone, or that Marian Gaborik had excellent efficiency carrying it in. Maybe we find out that Jordan Nolan dumps the puck far more than he carries it in because he knows his strengths and he plays to them. There are a lot of directions you can go with this from a strategic basis and an individual basis.
There are ways around a heavy neutral zone trap, namely dumping the puck in. However, with the Kings this is generally a strategy used by default on the team's lower lines. How can we decipher that? Let's turn to the data we are talking about.
Since we are looking at entries today, to start here is the raw entry percentage of each forward on the Kings team. We will primarily be analyzing forwards, since defensemen, outside of dump plays, have little impact on controlled entries.
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Controlled entry simply means a play in which the Kings started with possession, entered the zone, and maintained control of the puck. A chip play into the corner with the intention of finding another player in the corner on entry would be counted as a controlled entry if it finds its target since it is a designed play. This may be one of the few grey areas concerning entries. Did the dump have an intended target. This was taken into consideration on tracking. not all dump ins are created equal**
This is about 60 games of data give or take some of the players who phased in and out of the lineup through trade/injury. So it is a pretty decent indicator of a season long trend, although as an analyzer of this you ALWAYS want more data (Which is why next year we will embark on the same endeavour but with MORE!)
As you would expect, good players are good, centers are very responsible, but there are a few surprises.
Okay, let's go deeper.
At this point we break it down into wings and centers differently. They each play different roles on the team so it is not really fair to lump them into the same bin.
Let's take a look at the center group in detail.
Note, these are stats taken
AT 5v5 ONLY, since that is the best way to gauge entry proficiency. Powerplays, by nature, would create easier entries that aren't true to the rest of the game. (presumably).
I have taken the liberty of bolding and highlighting a few things of discussion here.
1. First thing is first, Kings centers are pretty good at entry. That would make sense since they are asked to be the most responsible ones on the ice in the Kings system. The team average for Forwards of controlled entry was 70.46%. Every Kings center, even Andy Andreoff, was above the 70% average EXCEPT for Vincent Lecavalier. Unsurprisingly, Lecavalier also had the worst possession metrics of any Kings regular center down the stretch.
Was there a correlation? You could perhaps interpret the data as such. But correlation does nto equal causation. It is important to remember that when analyzing data. We will get more into that later however.
But what stands out more as a red flag with Lecavalier in regards to his struggles with zone entry was HOW he struggled with it.
Lecavalier held a rather low 43.8% pass attempt zone entry percentage. The only forward lower was Andreoff. However, here is the real difference: Andreoff didn't try a lot of pass in plays. Lecavalier attempted nearly a third of his total entry attempts via the pass. That's an extremely high number. For reference, Kopitar, a natural playmaker and a fine distributor of the puck, attempted just 16.3% of his entries on passing plays. He carried the puck in more often than anything. As did Jeff Carter. When it came to the Kings bottom two lines of Shore and Andreoff, what do you think they were doing? Yup, dumping the puck. Throw the puck deep and let the wingers do the work. We will touch on this in the next point.
To continue on with Lecavalier, we are not trying to hate on him as a player, but it was fairly apparent that he played a different style of hockey than what the Kings are used to. His dump and carry in rates were extremely low for a center, and he was not very good at it either. Either Lecavalier was not comfortable dumping the puck in and playing more North-South, or he just trusted his own passing a little too much. Either way, it led to one of the team's lowest zone entry success rates.
Here is a play, that perhaps is a bit nitpicky (Which you have to be careful about doing with almost any critical analysis), of a possible disconnect overall on players/styles.
While Lecavalier does the right thing by staying low to help out his defensemen move the puck up, he turns up ice and instead of gaining center red and dumping or trying to skate it himself he opts to essentially suicide pass Kyle Clifford. Lecavalier then went for a change on the play as possession changed hands over to the Sharks. It is little things like that that speak to a sort of stylistic difference between Lecavalier and the Kings bottom line centers like Andreoff, Shore, or Lewis, who would just simply drive the puck in in that situation. We all know that Lecavalier, for all the good things he did, had lost a step. However, being a highly skilled player in his time, he still tried to play the old way. With the Kings in particularly that can be a difficult task. Centers have the biggest stress put on them, and guys like Andrei Loktionov rarely cut it with the Kings due to that identity problem within the system. Even the Kings better centers, Carter and Kopitar, drive the puck in themselves rather than attempt high risk passes or dump plays. Lecavalier played a very different way and that much was apparent down the stretch and into the playoffs.
2. Nick Shore.
Yes I know you are all tired of hearing about the love affair this blog presumably has with Nick Shore. Nick does a lot of really good things, but here is an instance where we can put out something he desperately should work on.
It is one thing to dump the puck in as a means of entry when other options are not available, however it is entirely different when it becomes second nature and you stop attempting other things.
That seemed to be the case with Shore. Despite holding a very strong 82.8% carry in success rate (Better than Kopitar at 81.1), the young center opted for a staggering 57.3% uncontrolled entry rate. As you can see, of the three types of entries, Shore chose to dump 50.8% of the time versus 17.8% pass, and 31.4% carry. Carrying the puck, his strongest type of entry, came second to simply throwing the puck deep and hoping Lewis, Brown, King, or Clifford got to it. He also was not too bad at passing the puck either, so basically any type of entry would have been better than constant dump in plays.
For a player like Andreoff, that's okay. You want Andreoff making low risk plays if at all possible. He is a fourth line player, just get him dumping the puck in, getting it deep, and grinding out shifts. Basically try and keep the puck as far away from your own goal as possible. However, both of these guys, and Shore specifically, were pretty good at CONTROLLED entry.
This speaks to the idea of role within the Kings. Bottom line centers play the way we just described within the Kings system. Dump it in, grind it out. Dump it in, grind it out. Make low risk plays, do your job, get to the bench. The problem there is that sometimes you get players who excel at something OTHER than that, but have the identity and role placed upon them of something different. Darryl Sutter has been noted as being a master of defining a role for a player. This is a very good thing when you have a structured system in place. However, in some instances, and we have seen it before, players do not look like they fit the role they are placed in. Young players trying to break in are asked to play bottom-six roles. They struggle when it does not match their skillset and they cannot break the top two duo of Carter-Kopitar for top-six "Skilled" role minutes (Rightfully). Jordan Weal fell victim to it, the aforementioned Loktionov, Linden Vey, etc. etc. This is also part of the reasoning behind our advocation of Nic Dowd in the top-six for at least an extended part of the next season. Nick Shore is PERHAPS a case of this. He lacks a little bit of punch in terms of finish so far in his career, but there are again flashes of very solid offensive playmaking that perhaps are pushed to the side because of his "Role". His role has been defense first, and he has done okay with that. How his offensive skill has translated, well, it is hard to take true advantage of playmaking when you are pressed to dump the puck and cede possession to your wingers. Shore goes into overkill it seems though. Do we know if the extreme amount of dumps is Sutter in Shore's ear? Or is it Shore trying to play too safe or not playing with enough confidence?
Those were the two major points that we can touch on with centers and entry, now let's turn to the wingers.
Here are the raw entry numbers of the Kings wingers.
1. In the same way we see an identity crisis of sorts with Nick Shore and his style of play, we see it with Kris Versteeg in the wing group, and to a small degree Tanner Pearson.
Versteeg was very efficient on carry-ins, so was Tanner Pearson. They both dumped the puck waaaaay too much. Again though, both Pearson and Versteeg spent a LOT of their minutes in the Kings bottom-six. So their role as defined by the Kings structure was get it deep, grind it out. Low risk plays.
It is a bit more difficult with wingers really though. Chip and dump plays are far more common with wingers because speed is usually a plus asset. With both Pearson, Lewis, and Versteeg this is true. All three of them had very high dump in rates.
Then you look at a player like Gaborik, Lucic, or Brown, who fancy themselves as more skilled navigators of entry, and their dump in numbers are much much lower. All three of them played a lot of top-six minutes this year. Should Versteeg have been playing like a bottom-six player? Maybe, maybe not. Should Pearson be playing like a bottom-six winger? Maybe, maybe not. The point is, there is a very clear divide that shows up in the numbers of the stylistic approach of the Kings top-six centers and wings, and the bottom-six. If Tanner Pearson is moved exclusively into the top-six do we see numbers that drift more towards the Gaborik-Lucic style of low dump ins? Maybe. Again, next year will give us a good idea.
2. Kyle Clifford needs to be better. There is no other way to put it. He had poor entry rates, poor exit rates, and had a down year statistically in several ways. He plays the game the right way to be an effective Kings bottom-six forward, it just comes down to perhaps a few things on the offensive side. It is hard to really put a finger on how he could improve though. Clifford's dump rates were very high, yet he still struggled in the small attempts he made. It would be hard to tell him to dump in more. This one is a struggle that is hard to answer, so more time will be needed to evaluate where he goes.
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So with these numbers in place one large question comes up that you yourself can ponder. How do you maximize the skill sets of the players you have without losing the defined roles your team has?
Again, Darryl Sutter has done an excellent job for the most part at putting the right puzzle pieces into the right slots in order to maximize the skill sets over the years. However, there might be a few inklings in the last year as players have changed, declined, and left the team, that points to a lack of adjustment. It is hard to break yourself of habits, and hockey players, GMs, and coaches are no different. The decline of Dustin Brown was very steep and difficult to adjust to. The additions of Versteeg and Lecavalier put the Kings in an awkward position of having almost too many "Skilled" centers or wingers. Is it perhaps a time to move away from the defined Top-six/Bottom-six and move to a Top-nine skill and a bottom line grind line? These are questions you can ask yourself as we endure the long offseason, but they are questions we can hopefully tackle a little bit better with an idea of who is excelling at what types of plays. Entries do not paint the entire picture. Just like with any statistical evaluation you use these as complementary evaluative tools. Take them with a grain of salt, but they are compelling no less. They help us see the defined structure of the Kings that has been both their greatest asset and one of their potential hindrances.
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