I will say it's pretty funny watching you say things like 'faceoffs can win games, look at last night' when the Rangers lost the game, and they lost it guess how? It all started by winning a faceoff. The Rangers won the draw, dumped it into the corner, Tampa had a free zone exit, Trouba sucks, Stamkos scores, series over.
Every coach isn't wrong. They're paid to worry about this stuff. But it's hard to have any sort of edge in these scenarios. Everyone else is also scheming. Some teams are definitely better off faceoffs than others, some teams are better at puck retrieval after losses, some teams are good off wins, bad off losses, etc. It's a game within the game for sure, but it's only a few goals a year at the margins, and the best and worst results, like everything else in hockey, probably aren't repeatable. The trouble is that the best data on faceoffs left the Internet to go work for the Devils, Tyler Dell.ow looked at thousands and thousands of faceoffs, more than any coach ever has.
Again, this is reductive. Sure, having the puck at the point is great, but point shots off faceoffs can easily be blocked and turn into breakaways the other way. That's rare, but so is scoring a goal off a faceoff win, and the quicker a scoring chance is registered by the defending team from a defensive-zone draw, the more likely it is to be way better than a chance off an offensive zone draw.
I’m just guessing NJ.com isn’t paying anyone a bunch these days.
