Through 37 games, the Detroit Red Wings’ powerplay is operating at an abysmal 11.7%. In fact, if the Wings were to finish the season at this conversion rate, it would be the worst Red Wings’ powerplay since the NHL started keeping track of these stats in 1987-1988.

Source: NHL.com

Many fans have expressed frustration with the Wings’ powerplay, particularly the Wings’ zone entries.

Hearing your frustratings, I’ve spent the last week re-watching every single Red Wings’ powerplay from the first 36 games to evaluate their zone entries. To start, let me introduce a few definitions. Of note, the tracking definitions I use are slightly different than those used by Arik Parnass in his tracking of the NHL Special Teams’ Project last season.

Definitions:

Dump - A player shoots the puck into the offensive zone with the intention for his team to regain possession

Pass – A pass made to a player within one stride of the offensive blue line who then attempts to take the puck into the offensive zone

Carry – A player starts more than one stride away from the offensive blue line and attempts to skate the puck into the offensive zone

Controlled – Any attempted carry or completed pass that tries to gain the offensive zone

Uncontrolled – Any dump-in or passing play that did not connect

Successful - Any entry that results in the puck remaining in the offensive zone for at least two seconds

Formations

Each of the Red Wings’ attempted entries fell into one of the following categories:

Drop Pass

Canuck Center-Lane

Faceoff - An entry attempt that resulted from a neutral zone faceoff win

Transition Turnover - An entry attempt that started off of a turnover from the opposition

Regroup - An entry attempt where the powerplay attempted to quickly re-enter the offensive zone following the puck being cleared into the neutral zone

Miscellaneous - An entry attempt off of a broken play at 5v4 or an unstructured entry attempt at 5v3 or 6v4

Results

Through the first 36 games, the Wings attempted to enter the offensive zone on the powerplay 402 times.

Let’s start first with the comparison of carry vs. pass vs. dump entries

From this table, we see that carry-in entries resulted in the most offensive zone time, the most attempted shots, and the most goals per 100 entries. This is consistent with what we’ve seen at 5v5 and should not be surprising. Dump-ins are very effective at getting the puck in the offensive zone but little else.

How Passing Affects Entries

Next, let’s examine if the number of passes made prior to an entry affects the success of an entry. Arik Parnass, creator of the NHL Special Teams Project, posited that the more passes made prior to an entry, the less likely it was to be successful as there were more chances for the team to fumble a pass.

Interestingly, three or more passes resulted in the most shots attempted per entry. However, my suspicion is that this is related to sample size as the Wings only have 28 entries that had three or more passes. Removing that group, we see that zero passes was better than one pass which was better than two passes, supporting Parnass’ theory.

How Formation Affects Entry Success

Next, let’s examine how the Wings perform based on the formation they set up in. We’ll start with the “vaunted” drop pass. The Wings have set up in the drop pass formation 137 times this season, representing their most utilized formation. Within the drop pass formation, the Wings have three main plays:

• Defenseman keeps the puck and carries/dumps into the offensive zone

• Defenseman drops puck to trailing players

• Defenseman passes puck ahead to wingers along the boards

We can further sub-divide the drop pass data into scenarios where the puck was actually “dropped” to a trailing player versus scenarios where the puck was not dropped but the team lined up in the drop pass formation.

Interestingly, when the Wings line up in the drop pass formation, but don’t actually drop the puck, they generate more shots and far more goals.

Taking the drop pass data as a whole, let’s compare how the Wings perform in other formations.

From this data, we can see that the Wings are most successful off of neutral zone faceoff wins. However, when comparing controlled breakouts, we see that the Wings generate more shots off of the Canuck Center-Lane breakout as opposed to the Drop Pass breakout. This finding was actually a bit surprising when we examine how the puck actually enters the zone off of these two breakout formations.

When the Wings set up in the drop pass, they had more successful entries, more controlled entries, more carried entries, fewer dumped entries, and more one-pass entries. That would suggest that the Wings should have better results with the drop pass. However, the Wings primary struggle with the drop pass is that the player with the puck has very little support once he enters the zone.

One of the goals of the drop pass is to have the player with the puck hit the offensive zone with speed while the defenders are flat-footed. Unfortunately for the Wings, they have had the opposite problem. When Andreas Athanasiou hits the blue line in the clip above, he finds himself alone in the offensive zone as the Philadelphia defenders collapse on him. He has nowhere to go with the puck and as such, the Flyers are able to force a board battle which prevents the Wings from setting up in formation. This may be why the Wings average fewer shot attempts when they drop the puck in the drop pass formation.

Conclusions

From the results presented, the Red Wings have been most successful when carrying the puck into the zone as opposed to passing or dumping it in. When considering the number of passes made prior to the entry, the Wings have been most successful when making three or more passes, although this is likely due to the extremely small sample size. Removing that group, the Wings perform better the fewer passes they make prior to the entry.

From a formation perspective, the Wings performed better when operating out of the Canuck Center-Lane breakout as opposed to the Drop Pass breakout.

Furthermore, when the Wings perform a drop pass out of the Drop Pass formation, they generate even fewer shot attempts. This is likely due to the fact that the Wings offer very little support to the entering player.

Limitations

Ultimately all of the data listed above is manually tracked and as such contains subjective bias. Each entry was watched at least three times to confirm accuracy of the recorded information. However, despite setting strict definitions, there are still situations where a subjective decision is made and as such the data should be taken with a grain of salt.

Second, this is only a half-season analysis of a single team. The sample size is small and the conclusions generated here may not apply to other teams that construct similar plays.

Third, the data presented here is descriptive and not predictive. The results presented here are meant to be hypothesis-generating and spark further work into assessing predictive measures for powerplay goals.

Finally, here is a link to the raw data if you would like to explore it yourself.