Penguins coach Mike Johnston taking aim at offense from seestyle's blog

PITTSBURGH The Pittsburgh Penguins, so far, have an offseason to forget. So for a few minutes, let's forget about it.Forget that the team fired its general manager after another postseason collapse, but not its coach at least until the new general manager sort-of-kind-of-not-really had the chance to do it himself.Forget that the new general manager is, literally, an old general manager.Forget that Jim Rutherford publicly stated that he'd found his guy, then had that guy take a job other than head coach of Mikhail Grigorenko Jersey the Pittsburgh Penguins.Forget that the guy that Rutherford did eventually hire, Mike Johnston, was suspended by the CHL for improperly footing the bill for flights and a cell phone. Forget that Johnston's top a sistant, Rich Tocchet,e sentially was hired first.Instead, let's focus on Johnston's plan for his new team. Given some important evidence, and the caliber of the players he's now in charge of, it makes a lot of sense."There's core things you're going to be able to see, and you're going to be able to say 'this is how the Pittsburgh Penguins play,' "Johnston, an NHL a sistant from 1999-2008 and head coach of the Portland Winterhawks from 2008-Tuesday, said Wednesday. "And that's what I've been able to build in the place. Once you build that template, then you maneuver pieces around within the template."That differs from ex-coach Dan Bylsma's in a few ways, but for our purposes, it's worth focusing on One Big Thing: offensive zone entries.Johnston's methodology for that focusing le s on stretch pa ses through the neutral zone and more on centers carrying the puck in with several different options in place is more conducive to generating shots, which is more conducive to puck po se sion, which is more conducive to winning games.We want to be a puck-po se sion team, Tocchet said. That's what the playoff teams are."That's not opinion, either. There's evidence. The biggest piece so far came at the 2013 MIT Sloan Sports Analytics conference. Four researchers, including , tracked more than 300 games from the 2011-12 season and found entering the offensive zone with po se sion, rather than dumping and chasing, generated roughly twice as many shots, scoring chances and goals. Not part of the equation: dumps meant to create time for line changes and entries off odd-man rushes.If that seems obvious, it's because it is; it's better to have the puck than not. Gaining the zone with the puck is also not easy-peasy if it were, everyone would do it all the time. Some guys are bad Andreas Martinsen Jersey at it. A goal, though, should be to stock your roster with the other guys. That's Rutherford's job.Another goal should be to make sure the guys on your roster who can do it do it effectively and regularly. That's Johnston's job and there's a reasonable amount of evidence to suggest that Bylsma, for whatever reason, didn't wholly emphasize it. Despite rostering two of the best centers on earth and a few eminently capable skating defenseman, Pittsburgh succe sfully carried the puck into the offensive zone about 46 percent of the time, which is below the NHL average.That comes from Corey Sznajder (), who was a co-author of the Sloan piece and is nowin the proce s of tracking zone entries for every NHL team. It's a mammoth, amazingly helpful undertaking, and he was cool enough to share Pittsburgh's stats from the first 42 games and then another in April.For people who watched the Penguins a lot or looked at their puck-po se sion stats at all Sznajder's most glaring data point is one you'd expect; Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin were playing a different game. Crosby carried the puck on 75 percent of his 271 entries. Off each carry, Pittsburgh averaged 0.74 shots. Malkin carried the puck on 81 percent of his 209 entries. Off each carry, Pittsburgh averaged 0.60 shots.Remember that 46 percent number? That's with Crosby and Malkin's 75 percent and 81 percent mixed Colorado Avalanche Jersey in. They were free to work in a way Pittsburgh's other forwards weren't and that's fine. They should've been, because they're better players; the Penguins rostered a fair amount of guys who didn't deserve a fraction of that treatment, and that was borne out in the lack of production, both in points and puck po se sion, by their third and fourth lines.If you're looking for proof of that, you can find it in a lot of places and a lot of different forms. One of those came in of how responsibleeach team's forwards, divided into four groups based on five-on-five ice time, are for their team's po se sion succe s. Pittsburgh's bottom two groups got worked over. Big time.That chart, in a lot of ways, reflects more poorly on Shero than Tyson Barrie Jersey anyone else. The problems it illustrates double as the reason he lost his job. Still, Pittsburgh's i sues weren't just about a flawed roster. Bylsma didn't seem to optimize his bottom six, whether through lineup decisions (Craig Adams in the lineup every night, Tanner Gla s on the third line) and the way he deployed the guys that played.: There's reason to believe that Brandon Sutter is capable of serving as a viable third center. He carried the puck in on 43 percent of his 168 entries, though le s than the average player despite a decent amount of succe s doing so. Pittsburgh's 0.46 shot average on Sutter's carries weren't Crosby- or Malkin-level, but there's no shame in that. It's also a lot better than the 0.28 Pittsburgh averaged overall when dumping the puck and just as importantly, Sutter's carries failed 13.1 percent of the time, which was le s than Crosby's 18.5 percent failure rate and Malkin's 17.1. Why not use Sutter in that role more often?And why not put some of that puck-carrying responsibility on the defensemen? It's tough to imagine a player better suited than Kris Letang, who entered the zone with control on 40 percent of his 85 tracked attempts and generated an average of 0.65 shots on those po se Gabriel Landeskog Jersey sions. Paul Martin, Olli Maatta and Simon Despres arestrong skaters. So is Matt Niskanen, wherever he ends up and however much money he winds up making. Derick Pouliot, who Johnston helped mold into a 2012 first-round pick, could also be on the way, particularly if Niskanen signs elsewhere.Ultimately, though, Johnston encourages his defensemen to join the rush, not lead it. When they push up, it's to create options and odd-man breaks. What happens after that falls on once again the guys in the middle."Our backside defense are very important in escaping (our) zone and eventually getting the right type of attack going, but your centers are critical," he said. "To move the puck through the middle of the ice and distribute it as you enter the offensive zone is very important. So that's why you take a look at this group of centers on this team and say they're tailor-made for this type of setup."Rutherford also spokeWednesday of Johnston's ability to make on-the-fly adjustments, which was not Bylsma's strong suit. Part ofJohnston's plan entai

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By seestyle
Added Sep 3 '22

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