Net Automatic (archived) by Shaun Earl, published 2025 for The Coaches Site
Net Automatic is a tactical strategy in hockey that focuses on creating scoring opportunities from behind the opponent's net. By positioning players around key areas, such as the face-off dots and the high slot, teams can generate unexpected passing and shooting angles. This approach disrupts traditional defensive setups and requires coordination among players. The tactic is adaptable, making it effective in both even-strength and power-play situations, ultimately enhancing a team's offensive capabilities.
The Offensive Zone Setup
Players must position themselves around the face-off dots and the high slot to create optimal passing lanes. This formation enables quick puck movement, making it difficult for the opposing team to defend. The player behind the net acts as a central playmaker, and with the help of his support players' positioning and coordination, this setup allows for dynamic offensive plays that maximize scoring opportunities.
As always I am trying to absorb as much as possible about the Beautiful Game + pushing my agenda against low % point shots. Please see full article if you have time, it's long but very interesting... also feels pertinent to some teams' seasons right now.
Excerpts from Passing Project Revisited - What does four years of passing data say about how NHL teams create offense? (archived) by Corey Sznajder for All Three Zones - published 13 January, 2021 via Substack
The NHL season starts in a few days and this is the time of the year where my brain goes into overdrive with tracking games & getting the data out in the open. You’ll get hit with a barrage of stats, charts and tidbits from me and other analysts. You’ll hear lots of terms like “shot contributions,” “low-to-high passes,” “transition plays” and “high danger passing plays.” What do they all mean, though? Are they important or are they just fun stats to look at during games?
[...] We’ve gotten better at estimating the individual impact of players using play-by-play data, but I feel like manual tracked stats will always have their place in help explaining the “why” behind macro-level stats. Unless a play led to a goal, you’re generally in the dark about most events, except for whoever shot the puck. Was it off a passing play or did he carry the puck into the zone & beat a defender to generate the chance? Which one is better?
Most of the legwork was done back in 2015 by Ryan Stimson with his passing project and his initial observations revealed some cool things about offense in hockey. Some of it is very intuitive, like how a shot preceded by one pass alone has a small, but positive impact on a team’s shooting percentage (7.2% on unassisted shots to 8% with one assist). That number jumps to 9.6% when another pass is added to the sequence, which bridges the gap a little between expected goals & actual goals. Through his work, we also know that passes from behind the net lead to goals at a higher rate than other passing plays, most notably shots from the point (which are the lowest of low percentage shots). Things to help bridge the gap between transition stats like entries & exits have also been looked at by him, so there has been a lot of neat discoveries made through manually tracked data. [...]
The Basics of Passing Data
Even with over 180,000 shots added to the database over four seasons, most of Ryan’s initial findings on the impact of a pass hold true. When factoring in rebound chances it’s especially true. Over the four seasons tracked, teams scored on 8% of their 5v5 shots on goal without a passing play. This is including rebound chances. If we exclude rebounds from this sample, that shooting percentage drops to only 4.1% out of all shots on goal. A rebound is recorded as an unassisted shot, but they are usually reactionary, second chance opportunities that are created off a shot from another teammate. They also come closer to the net & are a little different than your standard unassisted shots. Rebounds are also closer to the net and are somewhat difficult to track with 100% accuracy if you’re dealing with a situation where two or three players are going for the puck at the same time & are just jamming it into the goalie’s pads. All other unassisted shots had a shooting percentage of 5.6% or less, which goes to show the impact of just one pass. Yes, it’s only 3% but think of how many shots teams take in a year. Incremental improvements over time add up & that’s especially true when you consider that teams shot at 12.6% when they completed three passes before a shot on goal. [...]
Royal Road & Behind Net Passes Still King
Going strictly from a percentage standpoint, the easiest way to boost your team’s goal total is to generate more passes from behind the net or create a cross-seam play to get the goaltender moving. The same rules in 2016 hold true today. The interesting part is how rare those plays are, as they account for only 13.2% of all shots (excluding unassisted ones). Let’s say a team averages 44-45 shots a game during 5v5 play, this means that only five of those will come of what are categorized as “high danger passing plays.” Ideally, you want to find players who generate these types of passes, as the payoff is huge. The problem is most teams can only complete 2-3 of these plays per game unless they’re playing Doug Weight’s Islanders or last year’s New York Rangers. [...]
Do teams get burned more frequently if they miss on cross-seam plays or behind the net passes? Analysts will often gripe about players trying to be “too fancy” by looking for the cross-ice pass instead of taking the simple play. Sometimes forwards can get caught deep if two guys are behind the net, leading to a rush the other way, but is it any riskier than a shot from the point getting blocked? Ever since Ryan’s study, it felt like more teams were attacking from behind the net, but the overall frequency of these plays has stayed roughly the same throughout all four years. Maybe this suggests that more innovation can be done here. It would be interesting to see if there is a drawback to chasing these more dangerous plays while sacrificing shot volume. [...]
Cycle vs. Transition
If there’s one area that I’m still working to iron out with this type of tracking, it’s bridging the gap between zone entries/exits and the passing data. Looking at the table above, it looks like plays that happen in transition (stretch passes & passes from defensive or neutral zones) are low-percentage plays. A shot off a stretch pass is about as effective as a normal give-and-go pass and plays from the neutral zone don’t result in many goals either. This isn’t totally cut-and-dry, though. [...]
More passing plays in a sequence yields more goals but the reward from deeper passing plays isn’t as great as you’d think. At least compared to other sequences where 2-3 guys touch the puck before getting a shot on goal. This changes a little bit if it’s a stretch pass,* but the shooting percentage boost you get from these plays is in line with the other passing sequences listed. The one caveat here is that plays that originate from outside of the offensive zone produced a higher percentage of scoring chances, which could come down to an Expected Goals vs. Actual Goals debate & which you prefer as a coaching staff. [...]
Risks & Rewards of “Safe” Offense
If there is anything that stood out to me, it’s how often teams still revert to point shots for offense. Over 22% of all primary shot assists were low-to-high plays, which are essentially point shots that have roughly a 2% chance of resulting in a goal. These shots even getting on goal is a crapshoot because unless you’re shooting from 40 feet away on an unscreened goaltender, the puck has to travel through layers of bodies, traffic and other layers of defense. It’s the definition of a low-percentage play & an uncreative way to run your offense.
So why do teams revert to this? It goes back to a few things we discussed earlier. Hockey is a read/react type of game and most of the open space in the offensive zone is going to be up high where the defensemen are. You have more time & space to operate from up high and sometimes the only play available is to take the shot. It doesn’t mean you should do it, but in the heat of a moment during a game, reverting to the safe option is pretty normal. Scoring directly off the point shot also isn’t the primary objective, as you are usually hoping to score off a deflection or a rebound. How does that compare to, say, trying to setup from behind the net? From a shooting percentage standpoint it’s an interesting tradeoff.
Deflections & rebounds have the highest conversion rate out of all 5v5 shots tracked, shots that are deflected having a 29.9 shooting percentage and rebounds having a 23.4 shooting percentage respectively. [...] You get a decent scoring chance that about a 50-50 chance of getting on goal, which doesn’t sound that bad compared to some of the other options listed.
The issue with this is that we’re only looking at successful tip plays. If a team is attempting this setup & misses, what are you left with? A simple point shot that has less than 2% chance of finding the back of the net. Out of all 5v5 shots tracked that involved a low-to-high sequence, only 8% of them resulted in a deflection. So, while a deflection is a high-danger chance, generating them is tough and most of the time you’re just settling for a low-percentage shot. Combine that with shots off low-to-high passes only reaching the net 35% of the time, and it’s a tough way to win if that’s the only way you can create offense. The scarcity of goal-scoring in the NHL might encourage this type of hockey, but I still think more can be done with how skilled players are now.
