East to west
East to west
Like to play Football Manager? You might enjoy watching this NHL power play
Welcome to the eighth edition of Plot the Ball for 2023.
As I mentioned in a recent newsletter, I’ve been watching a lot of ice hockey recently — specifically, the NHL’s Edmonton Oilers, whose captain Connor McDavid1 is having one of the greatest seasons in the league’s history. If it’s not a sport you’re overly familiar with, consider this brief post an attempt to give you a way in — as well as an overview of the Oilers’ offensive brilliance.
Like to play Football Manager? You might enjoy watching this NHL power play
As I said recently, I don’t really like making predictions.
But I feel pretty confident in stating that, taken together, the readership of this newsletter will have spent a considerable number of hours playing the football management simulator Football Manager.
It’s such a renowned pastime of sports fans because there are so many aspects of it which are immersive and compelling — and, for those who have a head for numbers, many ways to mess around with analytical, data-driven thinking in a zero-stakes but coherent simulation of the real world.
If I’m honest, though, it’s not this part of the game which brings me back again and again.
Really, what it is that gives me disproportionate joy is watching the team you control scoring beautiful goals.
There is something about the game’s classic two-dimensional view of the pitch that makes watching slick combination play between a series of 11 animated dots much more thrilling than it should be, with the bird’s-eye view allowing you to anticipate the movement of players into space more easily than the broadcast view of football we’re all so used to.
You can also choose to speed up the in-game action ever so slightly, leading to an even slicker experience that still retains enough similarity to real football to be satisfying.
And whenever I watch the NHL’s Edmonton Oilers zipping the puck across the ice from one player’s stick to another’s — just that little bit faster than a football across the grass — I experience a similar feeling.
Led by Connor McDavid — far and away the best hockey player in the world — and a number of other elite forwards, they have stormed through the second half of the league’s 2022-23 regular season.
Across their 82 games, they have scored comfortably more goals than any other team in the league — 325 in total, with the record-setting Boston Bruins in second place at 301.
Where the Oilers have truly set themselves apart is when their opponents have taken penalties against them, and they’ve gone on the power play.
For every 60 minutes they’ve played this year in situations where they’ve had at least a one-player advantage on the ice, they’re scoring a remarkable 13.2 goals.
This is almost 2 full goals per 60 minutes more than anyone else2 in the league’s recorded history3.
Hockey is often an up-and-down, end-to-end game, with possession fiercely and physically contested.
But the power play is by far the best time to watch teams exchanging passes in settled possession in the offensive zone — akin to the style you might expect to see top football teams playing — and it can be beautiful to behold.
Across the NHL, power plays are currently excelling — with goals being scored at higher and higher rates — for a number of different reasons.
One major trend is the abandonment of the typical two-defenceman plus three-forward set-up used in 5 vs. 5 play, with teams putting more attacking talent on the ice by replacing one of the defencemen with an extra forward.
Alongside this change in strategy, teams have also (in a move that will please formation-loving Football Manager diehards) rearranged the alignment of their personnel on the ice.
A 1-3-1 set-up is now in fashion, with the aim of moving the puck from side to side — ‘east to west’ in hockey parlance — to get the goalie moving and create dangerous shooting opportunities from closer to goal.
The 1-3-1 can be quite structured, with players tending to hold position in the same patch of ice while the puck is cycled4.
For Edmonton, however, McDavid is a wildcard: he uses his exceptional skating ability to move all over the ice in 5 vs. 4 situations5 and create havoc.
If you want to watch the Oilers’ power play in action, the regular-season highlight reels of McDavid and his teammate Leon Draisaitl6 are a good place to start: of the 114 goals they scored between them in 2022-23, 53 were on the power play.
You can also see them competing in the Stanley Cup Playoffs, which get underway this evening.
And you don’t have to get into the tactical or technical side of things to appreciate the beauty of their movement and interplay — not even if you’re a professional player yourself.
In a great feature earlier this season, The Athletic asked a number of current NHLers how they watch hockey in their downtime — if they do so at all.
German defenceman Moritz Seider — who probably knows a thing or two about football, given his background — gave a refreshingly honest answer:
The power play is one of the easiest parts of ice hockey to grasp for those with knowledge of other sports — and the Oilers’ historic one is a great entry point.
Connor McDavid and his teammates are scoring cool goals, and playing good hockey. Whether you’ve watched hundreds of NHL games or none, there’s not much more to it than that.
You can find the code for this piece on GitHub here
In second place is another recent Oilers team — from the pandemic-shortened 2019-20 season; the 2020-21 and 2021-22 teams also appear near the top by this metric.
The Tampa Bay Lightning’s top-five power play is a good example of this: the three of their 1-3-1 is clearly arranged from left to right across the offensive zone, as these shot maps from Micah Blake McCurdy’s site HockeyViz show: the right-handed Steven Stamkos plays inverted on the left, Brayden Point is the ‘bumper’ in the middle and Nikita Kucherov is inverted on the right.
Compare his HockeyViz 5 vs. 4 shot map to the more tightly clustered Lightning players’.
Per HockeyViz, Draisaitl’s positioning in the Oilers’ set-up is much more fixed: shooting with his left, he tends to play inverted on the right-hand side of the offensive zone.