Discover Top Posts Tagged with #pdo lb

film club — mt19’s playoff run

[image ID:

first tweet - @PTPJacob: My favorite Tkachukism is when he skates behind the goalie in the blue paint just to piss off the entire opposing team without actually doing anything wrong

reply - @GiancarloMattei: I enjoy it because he looks around for someone to hit him and sometimes they never show up so he just pushes someone.

/end image ID.]

the hockey pdocast did an episode revolving entirely around the nhl’s anti-hero unkillable pest destroyer of dreams toppler of titans mindgamer of the world etc etc tumblr’s poor meow meow of the week chucky.

i ran it through OpenAI Whisper for transcription mainly bc of archiving reasons and also i think pdo’s brand of fictionalization of the game makes for useful lore/reading. i cut some stuff about forechecking because i do not know enough about zone exits... and it does not serve my evil fujo interest.... and also the speakers aren’t differentiated because i cannot tell their voices apart sometimes LOL

this is by no means the whole 51 minutes bc it started to get illegible at some point. i just edited and trimmed the text output. all content credit goes to pdoguys but this is mostly because it's nice to have alternatives for auditory needs reasons :)

wordcount: 7175

So here's the plan for today. We're going to do a film club. We're going to do Matthew Tkachuk, a player that we've been planning on doing this for a while. Full disclosure, we had this one scheduled for Thursday yesterday, and then something came up and we had to push it back a day. And that's why there wasn't a show yesterday.

Initially I was worried because I wanted to do it as kind of like a primer for the Eastern Conference final before that series started. And I was like, I don't know what's going to happen in this game, especially with Matthew Tkachuk, anything could happen. He could either have an amazing game or he could do something and get suspended. I'm like, I don't know if this is going to age very well and if we're going to be able to do the show on Friday. And then the timing turns out couldn’t have been better because he scores the overtime winner to mercifully end Game One of the East Final before it reached the fifth overtime. And so it turns out there really are hockey gods and they're looking down upon us here today.

But as the game went on, you started to see that classic Florida forecheck that's been so good — and really for me, the story of the postseason — start to shift the tide of that game. And Matthew Tkachuk, who's frankly been at the absolute helm of that forecheck this entire postseason — for it to be him was super representative of the Florida experience. Well, if I could think of two teams who pace themselves less over a course of 60 minutes than these two teams, it's like they go full blast pretty much every single shift, right? So for them to then have to play essentially an extra game in the same evening is very physically taxing. And also on the note of the adjustment, I think we're going to get into this with Tkachuk himself, but I thought that he made some clear adjustments as the game went along because, I was sweating it for a while and I thought in regulation, it was one of the worst games, if not the worst game I've seen him play this postseason.

A lot of the stuff he had been doing in Rounds 1 and 2 in terms of waiting for the puck to come to him, doesn't really work against this Hurricanes team because they pressure so hard man-on-man that when he's waiting along the boards for the puck to come to him, by the time it gets there, someone on the Hurricanes steps in there and either pokes it away or gets in his space much quicker than what he had been used to in the previous rounds. So he made a bunch of turnovers. I think at least a handful to Brett Pesce, who'd felt like he was all over him. And then as the game went along in the overtimes, it felt like he really got his footing, got his bearings. And by the time the fourth overtime came around, he was setting up a handful of grade A chances and kind of looking much more like the Matthew Tkachuk we'd seen in the first two rounds. So I thought that was pretty notable.

Circumstances beget that forwards fulfill different roles. Not every forecheck is the same. Not every breakout's the same. Hockey's a chaotic game. I may prefer to be F1 in the series. Got to be F2 in the circumstance. That's just the way things go. And there's not always a defined and set role. You got to know how to play every space. But I do think that it was extremely interesting that what we saw last night was Tkachuk play the role of the straw stirrer, the front forechecker in the Florida system, less than ever last night. Because Carolina is executing this very simple breakout to neutralize that man. They want to take as much time and space as they can. And it's just a very simple D-to-D structure … But it renders that top guy less effective in most controlled circumstances.

So where do they move Matthew Tkachuk now to have the most level of effectiveness?

It's in the middle two of the Florida system. It's a one, two, two. They put him in the middle. And it did, to your point, it didn't go well. You kind of saw him almost be more reactive, where Tkachuk at his best is an unleashed animal. I think we can both agree with that. The guy is just the epitome of controlled, smart, aggressive hockey. But as the game wore on, and you saw it in the OT goal, he began to attack himself in that middle of the ice and go from reacting to proactively getting on the puck and making circumstances for the recipient of that second breakout pass really difficult.

So all this is to say, we could probably start here. You could focus on the individual skill. Great. Good shot. You saw it. Overtime shot looked perfectly placed. You could focus on the aggression and the forechecking and sort of like the tempo he brings, which is a tangible impact of the game. But I think you got to start with the head first, the brains. We've talked about this, he always seems to have that anticipatory next step on everyone he plays with. And no matter who the opponent is, he's just moving at a pace. They just can't seem to keep up from a decision-making perspective.

And he has to, right? Because if he plays the foot speed game, he's going to lose every single time. So he almost has to adjust in that way. And that's a great point. I mean, this forecheck of theirs, I don't even know what the tally is up to this point, but it's got to be in the double digits, of goals they've created this postseason within seconds of forcing a turnover in their attacking zone and other team's defensive zone.

…

And that's a really good point you make there because I naturally envisioned him as being that aggressive F1, right? Who you just picture him barreling in and sometimes throwing those kinds of reverse checks even to try to dislodge a defenceman from a pocket and force of turnover that way. But now that he's playing on this combination with Bennett and Cousins, sometimes it works where he can kind of defer to those guys to use their wheels to go in there and disrupt. And then that allows him to be almost like a safety net, right? He's standing there in the zone and then he can read where the play is going,

…

And I think like for Tkachuk, even in the evolution of last night's game, it went from constantly being physically engaged with someone and thinking that that was the right move to playing off of them and then attacking and closing and giving them this false sense of space that they have the space and time to make their play. And then coming in with an active stick or a hip check or a body really quick closing to be able to disrupt it. He almost, you talk about a safety net in the quarterback's eyes, it's playing off the ball too. And giving that quarterback the sense that the route is open and when it's not, you have the jump, you know what's about to happen. I just thought it was interesting to see that play out again through the course of last night. It's difficult to notice live, but I think on re-watching some of those overtimes, you start to see him stalk you like a shark in the neutral zone, right?

Well, and for forwards, I think it's really difficult to properly, I mean, for every player, evaluating defense and properly attributing who's responsible and then how we weigh that compared to the offensive side of things is always difficult, right? And I think part of the problem for me, I liked the trade when they made it in the off-season because I thought it was a very shrewd move from a business perspective, of not only divesting themselves from two diminishing assets that are in their thirties and are due for a big payday, but also locking yourself into a longer runaway with a guy who's 24 years old or whatever and just basically having the rest of his prime, right?

So I really liked it from that perspective. I wasn't entirely sure what we were going to get from him at this season because first off, the counting stats offensively were unlike anything he'd done previously, right? And part of it seemed to be inflated by the ridiculous play-making season Johnny Gaudreau had beside him and some inflated percentages.

...

And I think some of these things from the forecheck to the anticipation to moving them in the right direction constantly accounts for why those numbers are the way they are, right? Because you don’t necessarily think of most wingers as driving defensive results, but especially one who's kind of as plotting as he is, and with his foot speed, being able to do so, right? I think generally we think of a guy who skates really well and can pressure opposing puck carriers. Those are the guys who are good defensive forwards, but he does it in such a different way. I think that's why it's kind of tough to wrap your head around how he's doing it.

That's a good call. And I would also argue too, that the impact is there, but I don't know how much it's happening in the defensive zone. I feel like he's present there, right? Sure. But I think overall it's that disruption that occurs between the blue lines that allows to flip the play on its head and make these chances that really grossly benefit Florida, right? In the exchanges that he finds himself in. I don't have it in front of me, but I think looking at his playoff run this year, his goals-for percentage for Florida's at even-strength are over 80% right now, it's strangling.

Well, let me give you, I'll set the scene here. Let me give you all the rundown of his postseason metrics so far to give people an idea of it and then we can talk more about what we're seeing on tape on how they're doing it, right? And kind of build off of this conversation we started with.

So he's got six goals and 11 assists, eight of them primary — … that's overall 17 points, 10 five-on-five points, which are tied with Roope Hintz for the league lead this postseason. He's got 28 high danger chances taken, which leads the team according to NaturalStatTrick. And then by the data that I've tracked, he leads the team with 45 shot assists, which is— second on the team is Brandon Montour with 33. And a lot of that is like simple little power play passes and not actually being a massive playmaker like Tkachuck is, but then he set up directly 30 scoring chances in 13 games for the Florida Panthers.

Second on the team is Carter Verhaeghe with 15 to just give you a sense of how much of the puck is being funneled through him. And then he's making the decision of who it goes to in the offensive zone. .

...

And what's impressive to me, beyond all of that, because obviously all of those numbers … you're doing a lot of stuff right. It's who it's coming against.

So in round one, he plays 40 minutes against Brad Marchand. They're up four to nothing in those minutes. In round two, he plays 35 minutes head to head with Marner and Matthews. They're up four to one in those minutes.

…

[on game 1 against carolina] But that overtime winner came on a forecheck where they forced Burns and Slavin into making a mistake in their own zone. And those two guys through the first two rounds had been about as clean and infallible as you're going to get. Right. I've been talking about how I think Slavin should be like one of the Conn-Smythe favorites, how he had preposterous five-on-five on ice goal numbers himself. And so he's doing all of this against the other team's best players too. That's what's impressive about it.

Yeah, man, there's still a lot to take in there. First of all, the pair that he did that against last night and overtime, they had been basically infallible. But I think that it is a testament to the style of play and how it can cause you to see ghosts, right? Like in both of the length of a series as a whole, and then individually in the microcosm of a game, right? these teams love to have timing-based and route-based breakouts that work very similarly to how routes in football work.

You know, there's guys jutting through the neutral zone, very high rates of speed. You got somebody trying to get an object from them to the other guy, like through a body of opponents. Florida's ability to just destroy that and force teams to play a style of hockey that they don't have an interest in, that requires more work, coming back deeper into the zone, playing puck support in a way that most people probably don't like, taking a lot of flair out of your game, stifling a little bit of your creativity, all the way down to the timing disruption.

You know, you have to have the right mix to be able to do this, right? You have to have the right mix. Any line he's on, he's the straw that stirs the drink, but the rest of the mix has been right too. It's been players that can get up ice and jump on loose pucks quickly. It's players that can make the most out of transition opportunities. It's other players that have sort of like followed his lead and jumped in.

I mean, if you look at the raw turnover numbers that Corey tracks to the All Three Zones project, Carter Verhaeghe has been through the roof this postseason in his own ability to get up ice and create turnovers with forechecking. We've both said last show that these forechecks are really sort of defining the way that the game is played now, but when you start to look at the nuance of it and how Matthew Tkachuk fits into it specifically, you got to give credit to the staff for allowing them, them being the players, to go out and feast like this, because it's so much easier to play on the front foot in this game. When you're pressing the play and you're the one forcing decisions in hockey, you're always going to have more wind than the other guy. When you're forcing the other guy to chase you around or to go after loose pucks, that's what this whole thing is about. You become this reactionary opponent when the face of a style of play like this, and you begin to chase. It winds teams so viscerally, and I kept thinking to myself, the longer this game goes, and I know Carolina had chances late into that game, Bobrovsky was unbelievable. I mean, Shana Goldman pointed out his performance was second all-time in goal save above expected in the analytic era, but you could see as the game went on, it just became so taxing.

His understanding, to me, him being Tkachuk, how to make you skate the most is almost uncanny.

The way he presses you from an angular lane perspective, he forces you to reroute yourself or to take the long way to get there and be physically engaged with him the entire time.

If you have a goal in mind for your breakout, or just even as an individual player, there's nothing worse than having to take that extra mile in what should be a routine step for you. That's, I think, really what it is. It's playing your favorite video game on a difficulty level you've never even seen before. It's going to drive you crazy. Your muscle memory, all that, throw it out the window. It's like playing Tetris on level 99 speed. Most people don't know how to react with that as the starting point. I'm with you on that in terms of the combination of skills and why they've gelled so well together. At the same time, though, if you had told me at the start of the season that a line of Matthew Tkachuk, Sam Bennett, and Nick Cousins would be getting these types of numbers, I would not have believed you.

Because I think heading into the year, I was like, all right, well, they're bringing him in. They're going to pair him up with Barkov, in the interest of seeing how those skills mesh together. They haven't really done that. Then during the regular season, they had Verhaeghe on that line instead of Cousins, and their numbers were through the roof. I think they were up like 50 to 25 at 5-on-5 when they were out there together. When they started the postseason that way, they sometimes, throughout these games, either if they feel like they need to create something offensively in an isolated situation or situational in the offensive zone, they put Verhaeghe out there with him.

I love every single time they do that because him and Bennett create so many of these opportunities. Verhaeghe's finishing is such a boon next to them. I understand why they're not using them full-time that way, because Verheggie is very useful for Duclair and Barkov on the other line.

For him to be driving this line in this way with two guys who I do not think would be getting anywhere near these results without him is what's impressive. That's what makes him so effective.

I know if I'm describing it, he's a play connector. He allows all of this stuff to come together. Without him, it's a bunch of spare parts that are moving in different directions, but all of a sudden you put it together and everything seems to flow much more smoothly from their end of the ice through to deep in the offensive zone. 100%. He is the equivalent of a good midfielder in soccer, the way that he can connect all of your parts together and make the whole thing work.

The forecheck is the straw that stirs the drink. That is what makes this whole system, this whole thing work. That is where I think his presence is felt the most. I guess what shocked me, and we've touched on this already, but what shocked me is seeing how this is a team that lacks a lot of gross star power. If you look at the situation that we're in here, you wouldn't say Florida could keep up with, name-wise, a team like Boston or Toronto, but what shocked me was how much the impact of one really good player in the right environment could have.

You think about these stories in other sports, especially the NBA, I think, where you have one superstar that can make a run and do the superhuman to topple a supergiant with all these max contracts on it. This feels like that. This is that in hockey.

I don't know, frankly, that I could really go back in time in the modern, I don't know, you want to use the term, like, analytic era. Can you think of a story like this where a player became so... I go back to 1999 when Jaromir Jagr beat the Devils and upset them as an eight-seed and did it all by himself on one groin. I think about that sometimes.

To me, this is so uncanny. I'm not here to diss Florida. This isn't Diss Florida Fest. Right? But this is a star player being a star player and having this massive, unimaginable impact and toppling all these giants along the way. I just feel like this narrative and this scene is so grossly unheard of in hockey. I just don't see this thing happen all that often. It's just for a player of Tkachuk's ilk that seemingly lacks some of the flair and finesse that you would expect out of the high-end talent that are capable of that, that makes it even more uncanny and all the more bizarre and fun to watch.

...

To piggyback off what you're saying, though, is him coming in totally changed, not only the identity or whatever you want to say, but also how they play in certain ways. I think that's what they were trying to accomplish as well beyond the business and the financial thing and planning long-term. It was they clearly wanted to diversify their attack, change the way they play without necessarily completely removing some of that rush element, and they've accomplished that, and they deserve credit for it. Every time a team makes a run like this, we get a bunch of dissertations about, oh, this is what this actually means about team building in whatever year it is, and I don't think we necessarily need to spin it in that fashion.

...

No, I agree with that. I think that's what makes this so fun. There are some things you could look at and be like, I don't know. There's an uncanniness to this, like you said, but it's an example of me of a really good player being really, really good. You end up with a couple David and Goliath feeling out of the result and it's been, I don't know: That's good for the sport, in my opinion, market side.

…

I think Tkachuk might be one of the most, if not the most unique player in terms of skill-set in the game right now. I just can't really think of a lot of analogs for the combination of things he does. A lot's been made so far this postseason.

Dallas Akins was on the broadcast on Sportsnet during round two. He, during one of the intermissions, was talking about how much of the game, especially in the postseason, is played along the boards, how important that wall play is. That became a big topic of discussion.

In thinking about it and watching these games, there's probably no better player in the league right now at leveraging that to make successful possession plays than Matthew Tkachuk.

…

Well, I think probably the most impressive part about it to me is he never looks. If you're an opposing player trying to get some kind of tell about what's about to happen, where this puck is going to go, good luck. I don't think I've ever seen him telegraph this stuff and it's his ability to make...

What I would almost call it scoops and digs on the puck because he's not looking to make a tape to tape pass in most of these circumstances. I love the use of the term runway because it's exactly what it is. So you're engaging with him in some form or fashion, you think you've got him tied up, he could even use his legs most of the time. He's just looking to kick that puck into the area that you're not because you've come to him, you've drawn to him. And he knows that at the point he is in that system, he is, like we've said earlier, he's that connection, plays that role of uniting the front and back ends of your team together.

That's how he's doing it. In a world where time and space is as limited as it's ever going to be in the game of hockey, in the postseason, you have to be able to make these plays with a high level of effectiveness and is the smallest amount of time and the smallest window as you possibly can. So you see the play come to him, there's this physical engagement, you're expecting this long drawn out war, but he takes his stick on the backhand between his legs and just pushes the puck out to a teammate who's streaking through the neutral zone at 100 miles an hour and boom, here's this clean zone entry and it was a guy that you never saw coming.

So you're 100% correct and it's the ability to do it just based off of what his peripheral vision is telling him and trust in his teammates being where they should be. That's another big part of this too, is he's trusting that these guys are going to be there because he's not stopping and turning and looking and doing the traditional things that a lesser player would do to telegraph that pass. So all very just within the flow and the puck is with him for such a short period of time, but the touch he's putting on it is so important in the grand sequence of the event.

…

And Corey Schneider is tracking his regular season. I thought it was really interesting, the percentiles of how this works where he is in the 97th percentile in zone exits, one of the best forwards in the league at doing so.

He's only 65th percentile at zone entries, which makes sense, right? He's like, generally the guys who are the best of that are the burners who can just carry the puck in themselves, but he's in the 98th percentile in rush assists leading to shots or chances. And so at the other end of the ice, what he also does is he kind of posts up around that blue line and a similar effect where he can get it to a Bennett to then skate into it and have a rush chance himself. And it's so fascinating how he positions himself in these high leverage spots on the ice along the boards and is comfortable making these plays under pressure. And I don't know, it's really cool.

Daryl (?) always talks about how one of the most important skills or things that we need to talk about in hockey is improving the conditions of the puck, right? It's like you get the puck, it is either in a bad place on the ice or it's bouncing or it's kind of tricky to corral or someone's coming to pressure you. And what you do with it in terms of settling it and then making a play so that when you pass it to a teammate, they're in a better position. You're not just handing them a ticking bomb basically, right? Where they're going to get hit with it in open ice. He does that so well where he improves the conditions every time, like he knocks a puck out of midair, settles it, and then passes it to a teammate. And they're so much better off for it, right? It's like one of the most teammate friendly skill sets I think you can have.

We probably ought to focus on that a little bit more as one of his most underrated skill sets is the hand eye that comes in with him being a forechecker because he's flagging a lot of stuff down to your point. Everything he does is about forcing a defenseman to go the opposite direction of the way that they're going, which inherently kills their momentum, right? Because if you're a defenseman skating forward with the intent of playing offense and someone generates a turnover, you have to stop and go backwards to play defense, right? The other person that's coming at you doesn't have to stop, right? They have the puck. They now hold a distinct advantage over your head and he's taking a lot of really good defensemen and making them look bad, but they're looking bad because of the circumstance, right? The game is changing on them.

The tide shifts from offense to defense because of those plays he's making at the defensive line and the offensive blue line. I love the idea of him just being a facilitator of the play, right? Very rarely he’s the guy that is going to draw the puck across the line himself, but he's the one working it out of the defensive zone and then making himself available across the blue line to then redistribute the puck once the entry is complete. So they're really vital. I think that kind of role is, again, and I've said this now a couple of times on the show, the amount of brains you have to have and understanding of the way the game is played and the flow of it and putting a puck in an area that is either advantageous or disadvantageous for your teammate. To do all of that at the level of speed that he does it and it's just so seamless he doesn't delay anything, right? He makes these really important plays and decisions as they're happening without slowing a single thing down.

That's what makes him so difficult to mark in the offensive zone. Maybe this is transition for you, but he so often seems to be skating in a direction and way that is just totally the opposite of everyone else. You look at him and you think, what is he doing? But it's in preparation for whatever the next thing is. He's not thinking about the now, he's thinking about the two steps from now and going against the grain to get there in a lot of ways sometimes. It's funny to watch to me because you can always sort of notice him because he's doing something that you think to yourself, where is he going or what is this? It doesn't make any sense in the moment, but then a bang, bang play happened. Oh, okay. I get it now.

No, I'm with you. The only way to describe it is in the neutral zone. It's like a basketball player posting up and backing down a defender. I don't ever recall seeing someone do it in the neutral zone as much as he does and how comfortable he is with that in mind. Strategically, it's smart because you're protecting yourself and the puck in the sense that for the most part, we still see players can be reckless sometimes, particularly along the boards. They don't care if they see your numbers, they're going to run right through you and push you into the boards and take a penalty. But for the most part, it's not the game that it was 10, 20 years ago where it was just free range and it was like the wild, wild west.

You see someone, you're just shoving them no matter what direction they're facing. So in this sense, if you're facing the defender, then they can definitely run through you in a legal way more so. And so by turning his back to them, it's smart because he buys himself time to do that kind of like the peripheral surveying and scanning. It's a lot of notebook passes, but he's clocked where his guys are or where he expects him to be before he gets to play, right? There's a lot of scanning, which is a popular scouting term these days that he does. And they almost use him like a playmaking center in the NBA, like Nikola Jokic where it's like, they pass the puck to him, he turns his back in the post and then they send cutters in both directions in Cousins and Bennett or sometimes a Montour, if he's out there with him to then provide passing outlets and options for him.

And then he basically gets to decide who he wants to get the puck to, whoever's open and distribute that way. And it's such an interesting way to run a breakout scheme and kind of a neutral zone set the way that they do. And he's uniquely qualified, I guess, to do so. But it's just, it's interesting because, and that's why I said, I wanted to do this and how unique and how there was no analog to it because it does just visually look a lot different than what you see most teams do.

Yeah. Well, I don't know that I could, I mean, I couldn't sit here and name, you know, players like that who will turn and invite pressure. Sidney Crosby's done that.

Yeah. I mean, he'll keep you glued in the back pocket. And he's like, yeah, I'm comfortable with you there, this entire shift, but more so behind the net, right. And like, when you think about it, that's, that's a shift, right? Like,

it's a bit of a different skillset than just standing there at center ice along the boards, which obviously a center probably wouldn't be doing more.

So anyway, but Crosby is probably the best example in terms of comfort level being in that type of position where the defenders placed. Yeah. But I love that. I love what you said about like the step ahead scanning, you know, I mean, that's great. I mean, because, again, I can't stress enough that, if he waits a second too long in all of this, the idea of being able to make an area pass or just put the puck in a place where your teammates got the best crack at it and they have speed to get there: that's gone. It's you lose it. You know, that's a momentary thing. You know, that's something that happens in the second that it's happening based on the flow of the game.

And you lose that if you don't have that sense. So, and I think we probably ought to give a shoutout to his ability to play. You know, we've alluded to this too, but that lends itself to what he can do in the offensive zone. Right. And I think that whether it's him making the cut or him distributing the puck in the cycle, that line's ability to elongate an offensive zone shift, use an active D, right. There, there's a lot of understanding that's going on there in terms of, again, where everyone's supposed to be, what's the best angle to take to get there. And I love watching Tkachuk specifically walk out of the corner to the front of the net with the puck, which seems to be a huge preference of his, to try to get to the corner. And he's got a lot of distribution options on his way there too. Right. So it's not always just a crash and tuck opportunity. I mean, I think he gets pretty creative with it, but all these things tie together, you know, to make him sort of the more dynamic puck distributor that we've seen in a while in terms of approach and, like you said, the sort of post-up technique that he does where he knows somebody's — he wants to be engaged with physically, frankly, you know, he wants that. Magnetizing other players to himself just opens up space for everybody else. So he seems to really welcome that.

Where, it’s almost— he likes to initiate that first contact or feel where the defender is because then it locates everything for him, right. And then puts it into place, and then he can act accordingly off of it. It's always like a subtle little touch or a little bump.

And it's never anything that would get called, right. But, in a sense, it’s kind of like, the defender doesn't have the puck, and sometimes he does it before he gets the puck. So it's like, you're initiating contact.

It's interference, that grey area, but in the grand scheme of things, it will never get called the way it should. I mean, they let much more egregious things go, especially in the playoffs, but yeah, it's all of it. It’s very — there's a certain evil genius to it. And then there's a certain more subtle kind of creative genius to how he does it.

And he has to, because he won't be able to take the puck like Connor McDavid in his own zone and go coast to coast. So he has to do it differently.

You can get away with a lot more in motion, right? Like you're really going to get caught when two people are standing still and you take their legs out from under them or something like that, you know what I mean? That's where you really get in trouble. He is so good and masterful at in-motion contact. So he scored a couple of goals like this, this postseason, where he'll come through on a cycle, barrel through an area and just like you said, shove someone, right? Like at the moment that the puck's going to arrive, like he's preemptively moving them out of the way so that he's the only one that can get the crack on the puck.

And it's happening in a window that's, well, first of all, he's not egregiously tackling anyone, right? I think that's like, getting physical with someone and like using the same, I mean, — I'm not trying to explain away interference, but I think, you know, what makes it different to me is he's doing it in such a smart way, right? He's in motion. He's moving through an area and skates in the same place as somebody else happens to be skating. And he's going to win that physical engagement. He gets a little extension on him, sometimes there's a shove there, but he knows how to move people to create space. That's the takeaway, right? Like it's the same thing. It's the same idea. It's proactively striking under the defense that's going to try to stick lift you and take away your time and space. If you move them out of the way, they're not there. They can't do that when you get the puck.

But also the reality is that if you're the first person to initiate the contact, that generally does not get called. But then if there's a retaliation after, especially one that goes above and beyond, and then an embellishment follows, or a reaction follows, that catches the official's eye. And generally like they notice the first one, and then they're watching. Then if the second thing happens as a retaliation, that's what gets called. And that's how you get into a spot where Matty Tkachuk is drawing 10 penalties this post-season and taking only five, which is also another massive advantage for his team, right?

It's part of the game, for better or for worse. And sometimes it can be very frustrating if you're the other team, because you feel like they're getting away with a lot more than you, and then they're not getting called for. And then you do something and you're immediately called for it. It's very frustrating, but that's kind of part of the cat and mouse game here. Yeah. I guess cat and rat game. If you want to go with the radical meaning.

I'm happy he's had an opportunity to showcase. Like I said, you know, I think that we talk a lot about all this stuff and, and lost in all of that. I think the icing on the cake here is the fact he's a good shooter.

He's a good shooter. You know, he scored 40 goals this year. We haven't even mentioned it. Like we haven't even mentioned it, but this postseason for me with regard to his shot has been— what I think is his bread and butter. It’s like, I will sacrifice everything I need to in the world of velocity to put it exactly where it needs to go. There's a lot of really good innovation from him in ways that he can— keep his blade flat to keep the puck on the ice and the wherewithal to know when that's appropriate in loose puck situations versus clean shot situations. And you know, the tool is nice, but the discernment of the tool, right? That's what sometimes separates you and gets you to the 40 goal plateau. And discernment has been probably his best tool in his shot this year. It's the right selection. You know, you could have all the fancy clubs in your bag, but if you don't know how to use them, they're no good. And he knows how to use all of them.

So that is the icing on the cake to all of this. He can create these opportunities, and then as a finisher, where he often finds himself, given how close his proximity to the mouth of the net is, and where you can usually find him, when the cycle gets going, he is just clinical with knowing what that situation calls for and what the circumstances.

I'm glad we did this because we've been talking about doing this one for a while, but also I feel like a lot of, and I'm responsible for this as well, a lot of the playoff coverage so far through these first two plus rounds of the Panthers— has been what the Bruins and the Leafs have done poorly to lose or get upset in people's eyes, as opposed to what the Panthers might've done kind of force their hand or put them in those situations or win these games and what they did right. And now you look up and they’re are seven wins from the Stanley Cup along, certainly a long way to go from that. I think this series against Carolina is going to be especially hellish, with a lot of back and forths and twists and turns. It's going to be a long, hard fought one if, if game one is any indication, but, you know, I thought this was going to be a bit of a step back year for them as like a calculated bridge— to take a step back and then lock in a player long-term that's younger and then use the future years to add around him. And I guess they did technically in the regular season, right? It was big surprise. They almost missed the playoffs, but now you look up, and they're obviously having the success and having this magical ride through the postseason. So it was good to finally direct a bit of the attention or praise their way, I guess.

Yeah, agreed. And again, I have to reiterate that I think the lesson learned for me was star player value, you know, and how I'm not surprised to see him have this level of impact, but to, you know, for the mix to be this right. That's been the crazy part for me.

#pdo lb

Trending Tags

Recently Viewed Tags

#pdo lb