Learning Hockey, a Summer Series: Previously College Hockey 101, Nuts and Bolts 1: Transition Play, Nuts and Bolts 2: Forechecking, Nuts and Bolts 3: Power Plays, Nuts and Bolts 4: Penalty Kills

There was a rather humorous running joke on this past season's edition of the Michigan Hockeycast between David and I, where I routinely argued that I am not a hockey scout, which eventually morphed into me not being a scout of anything. While it's true that I'm not a water polo scout, an NFL quarterback scout, nor an archery scout, at this juncture, I am probably some degree of a hockey scout. I've watched enough hockey at the professional and collegiate level, and read the work of enough scouts for long enough, that I feel I have some amount of useful knowledge to lend to the MGoBlog community on how to scout the sport of hockey. So, I thought it would be useful to write up what I have learned about scouting as a capstone to my "Learning Hockey Summer 2021" series, tying together the strategy we talked about earlier and looking at the skillsets that individual players bring to the table, and talking about how to identify those skills. 

This article will look at the different components of scouting, the skills and tools that scouts analyze. Typical scouting reports for draft prospects contain six different areas that the players are graded on: skating, shooting, passing, puck skill, hockey IQ, and physicality. I will walk through each skill and look at examples of players who excel at it and what scouts are specifically looking for when they evaluate each skill. And as part of the goal of this article, I hope that readers who are moderately unfamiliar with hockey become a bit more acquainted with some of the lingo that David and I use in our hockey posts. Skating will be first up.  

[AFTER THE JUMP: skills, skills, skills!]

Skating

What makes a great skater? A lot of aspects, actually. I won't pretend to be an expert on skating technique because I'm not. There are dozens of trained professionals who have worked wonders on different players and their skating at all levels of play and I'm not one of those professionals. To that point, the rise of skating coaches means that players who are not great skaters in the junior level have been able to improve more rapidly and consistently than ever before. Want proof? Watch some of Brayden Point's (of the Tampa Bay Lightning) game and then try and comprehend that the reason he went in the third round of the 2014 NHL Draft was because he was considered a poor skater. It's mindboggling, because Point is now one of the league's best skaters. How did he do it? He worked with a skating guru, in this case Barbara Underhill, a former Canadian figure skater and now skating coach. This happens quite often, seen prominently last year with the Maple Leafs trying to fix Alex Galchenyuk's wonky skating stride. 

Skating gurus know all the intricacies that go into skating: boot placement, knee flexion, consistency, stride depth, use of the hips, stride discipline. I won't pretend to know the details on those and luckily for you, you don't need to know them in order to judge who's a good skater and who isn't. A lot of it can simply can just be judged by watching the players play, although I will admit that it's easier to discern great skating by viewing a player in person as opposed to on tape. I like to think about skating on two dimensions: north-south speed and agility. The former is pretty simple, looking at how fast a player is in a straight line, end to end in a rink. This can often just be done by looking at the players around said player. If the player in question is regularly dusting all of the surrounding players on the ice, they are probably a fast north-south skater. For the most elite skaters, this jumps off the screen. It's probably cheating to always use Connor McDavid as our example of speed, but... come on, man: 

Even someone who has never seen hockey before can tell that McDavid is a fast north-south skater, because he's just so much faster than everyone else on the ice. For every other player to ever play the game, it's a little bit tougher. Most guys don't reach top north-south speed all that often during a game (normally it only appears during rush chances) and so it isn't easy. Additionally, most players are going to fall in a gradient of average skating, somewhere between the fastest guys in the world and the slowest guys in the world. That makes judging skating more difficult. Don't feel terrible if your scouting report concludes with "seems like a decent skater". A number of reports I mentally file on players look something like that when it comes to speed. 

That's why you have to look for other hints on skating. The skating gurus may notice certain elements that provide hints about how good of a skater a certain player is. For example, Nikita Gusev is a player with a very inefficient and unhelpful skating stride: 

Here we see two plays of Gusev (NJD97), one where he's chasing a loose puck into the OZ, and the other where he's got a breakaway. In both cases, we're able to see the problems with Gusev as a skater. Look how hunched over Gusev's upper body is when he skates. His upper body is almost completely parallel with the ice, horizontally hunched over, making a right angle at his hips. Now scroll back up and watch how McDavid skates. His upper body isn't anywhere close to as hunched over as Gusev. Whereas McDavid is able to skate effortlessly and quickly, Gusev looks like he's plodding through molasses, grinding his lower body to keep himself moving, as if he's going to tip over. That's the kind of skating issue that a good scout will notice and a guru would love to fix.

If you see a player struggling to win a footrace to a loose puck, look closer and see if you can spot some inefficiencies in their skating stride. Maybe their legs bow out awkwardly. Maybe they have the knocked knee problem. Maybe they are hunched over too much like Gusev. I can't tell you I'm able to spot all of these problems, but this is a good way to start if you're trying to understand how good a skater is. You start by measuring speed against the other players on the ice, and then can dig deeper after that measuring stick. That's the best way to begin looking at skating from a speed component. 

The other component is agility, or your ability to stop and start, move laterally, and weave around obstacles. Wayne Gretzky was the greatest hockey player to ever play in the NHL, but he was not a terribly fast skater north-south. But he was an incredibly agile skater: 

Gretzky was the master of what he does in that six second clip beginning at 1:41, the stop-on-a-dime. That's an example of skating agility. Gretzky was able to stop on a dime as well as anyone ever. If you keep watching that video, you'll see several more instances of Gretzky craftily changing direction, stopping on a dime, and using his shifty, agile moves to create space for himself and open up passing lanes. What Gretzky lacked in straight line speed, he made up for in agility and lateral movement, one of the great east-west skaters of all time, powered by his fluid and movable hips. Judging agility is often easier than speed, as you're able to see it more obviously when watching a game and it requires less comparative measuring. If a player is changing direction, cutting across the ice, stopping quickly, doing crafty things with their feet, you can probably deem them an agile skater. 

These two areas, north-south speed and agility, are what I use to grade skating. Some guys are incredibly fast but not terribly agile (like Andreas Athanasiou), others aren't fast, but quite agile, like Gretzky. Some are both (like McDavid and Mat Barzal). A good scout is able to describe a player's skating ability on both dimensions. 

Jimmy Lambert mid-shot [James Coller]

Shooting

Measuring a player's shooting ability isn't easy because individual players don't shoot all that much in a given game. Great players may shoot 5-10 times in a game, but fourth liners might take one shot on goal and only 2-3 shot attempts total in any given game. That's not a whole lot to go off of, and so often times, judging shooting for a given player requires watching a lot of game tape on that player. Like with skating, there are multiple dimensions to examine with shooting, starting with the different kinds of shots: wrists shots and slap shots. For hockey novices, wrist shots are the vast majority of shots, where the power comes from the wrists and is done quickly while the puck is on the stick. Slap shots, meanwhile, are the big, booming shots you see from defensemen on a power play, that require a wind up and where most of the power comes from the shoulders in one fluid motion. Some players will have a great wrist shot, but a rather poor slap shot, while others may have the reverse. A good scout knows the difference for a player they are scouting. 

When grading either a player's wrist shot or slap shot, the primary two dimensions to look at are velocity and accuracy. For velocity, we're talking about players who can absolute bomb it, the Al MacInnis, Zdeno Chara, and well, Shea Weber types: 

I always think it's easiest to judge how powerful/fast a shot is in person, and a good trick I use is this: you can often tell how hard a shot is by how loud the sound it makes off the end boards is if it misses. A very hard slap shot will leave a loud thud that can echo through the ice arena. You can tell how hard Shea Weber's slap shot is by how loud the sound it makes off the glass in the above clip is... it comes through loud and clear on the rink mic! As a general rule, slap shots are going to be harder than wrist shots, but probably less accurate, and so when you're comparing shots between players, remember to compare wrist shots to wrist shots and slap shots to slap shots. Don't compare apples to oranges! 

As for accuracy, this is the ability for a player to put a good, accurate shot on net with routine ability. Bad shooters are those who miss the net routinely despite getting good chances (Ilya Mikheyev, Rickard Rakell, David Kampf, Luke Glendening), while the good ones are able to routinely put their shot on net, and not just weak, controllable shots. No one is better at putting hard shots exactly where he wants them than one Alexander Ovechkin: 

Ovechkin is the master of shooting and the greatest goalscorer in NHL history. He combines both the ability to put tons of velocity and power on his wrist and slap shots, but also the precision to place those shots exactly where he wants them. True snipers are able to pick every part of the net to shoot at and then put the pace on their shots to put it right by the goaltender. On the other hand, bad shooters look something like this: 

Experience Cody Ceci hockey pic.twitter.com/a4CvUbF6p2

— Michael (@TheLeafsIMO) August 8, 2020

If you remember to evaluate wrist shots separately than slap shots, and gauge each player's shot on both speed and accuracy, you're doing a good job of becoming a shooting scout. There are other aspects to scouting shooting that are more complex: judging the ability of a player to get a shot off, shooting off of one foot versus two, that sort of thing, but it's pretty advanced scouting. If you can just get a hang of assessing speed and accuracy and discerning the two types of shots, you're in pretty solid shape. 

Passing

What does it mean to be a good passer in hockey? There's a lot that goes into this, but I think the most notable part is just judging how much a player is passing. How often do you see them pass, as opposed to shoot when they're in the offensive zone? Some players are pass-first by nature, others are shoot-first. That's the first clue as to how good of a passer a player is. But once you begin to study a player, you'll start to pick up on different details when it comes to said player's passing ability. 

A great passer is one who regularly makes crisp, accurate passes to set up his teammates that then lead to quality scoring chances. Great passers see and recognize passing lanes that are hiding in plain view, ones that only decent or mediocre passers are unable to see. Great passers pass through multiple levels (i.e. passing from the point down low, or from one side of the ice to the other through bodies), feathering pucks through the opposition to hit a waiting teammate on the far side. Great passers are also able to make passes in stride, without having to stop their body, which sends a message to opponents that a pass is coming. For examples of a great passer, I present to you Trevor Zegras: 

Now I know that Zegras has yet to establish himself in the NHL fully, but watch him play at the NCAA, AHL, or even NHL level and you see how good of a passer he is. I like this play in particular because Zegras gets the loose puck below the circle and he immediately has his head up, scanning for a passing lane. He sees two teammates sprinting through the offensive funnel, and identifies Arthur Kaliyev, who is going to be crashing on the far side of the net. However, there are two Czech players in the way, and since Zegras is a left shot, his forehand passing lane is blocked by both opponents. So, he understands he needs to get the puck to Kaliyev through the slot, and he needs to do it on his backhand. The only solution? The spin-o-rama backhand pass, which he delivers in one fluid motion, through two bodies, right on the money for his teammate, and it leads to a goal. That's an A+ pass. 

If you see a player making a pass like that on a remotely-regular occasion, that's a pretty good indicator that the player in question is a great passer. Not everyone is going to make that level of pass, but that play shows off what you have to look for. Passing to set up a scoring chance? Check. Identifying teammates and difficult passing lanes? Check. Making a precise, accurate pass to a teammate? Check. Passing through the opposition to make a dangerous, layered pass? Check. 

Those are the aspects you should examine whenever you're grading a pass, the accuracy and success of the pass, what it led to, and how difficult the pass was. A great passer excels in all three areas.  

Kent Johnson has the most puck skill on Michigan's team currently [James Coller]

Puck Skill

This category refers to stick-handling, the ability of a player to maneuver with the puck through bodies and tight spaces and to high-danger areas of the ice. In hockey terms, we'd call the bulk of puck skill "dekes", sort of like tricks in skateboarding or snowboarding, nifty moves that can get the puck past defenders and to create open ice for the player with the puck. This is generally a pretty easy category to assess, because either a player is flashing puck skill or they aren't. Either they are making quality dekes and shaking defenders or they aren't. Like any category, some players are so high in puck skill that it's obvious and apparent, impossible to miss. On Michigan, Kent Johnson is one of those players who oozes puck skill, something that's easy to see every time you watch him play. At the NHL level there are any number of names I could cite, but as a lifelong Detroit Red Wings fan, there's a pretty obvious player, maybe the one with the highest puck skill ever: Pavel Datsyuk. 

Datsyuk's puck skill was simply unfair. He could pull a deke and move the puck out of any corner, through multiple bodies. Now you see him, now you don't. The Magic Man name was completely deserved. You're rarely going to see players who make that caliber of deke on a regular basis, but it gets to the core of puck skill. Players who are high in puck skill are able to make those good dekes regularly, and use them productively. It's one thing to make a cute play in a corner, but if it doesn't lead to a high-danger scoring chance, how good is the puck skill really? Thus, I propose two questions when you're evaluating a player's puck skill: 

1. How often is the player flashing puck skill (dekeing opponents, getting the puck out of tight spaces, etc) in a given game? 

2. How is the player using puck skill to set up productive plays for their team? 

That second component is something I think that Kent Johnson can improve on. No one denies the skill is there, and he can pull a laundry list of tricks out of the magic hat, but too often they don't lead to anything. They're a cool clip for a highlight reel, but they don't break the game open, don't result in a scoring chance. A player with great puck skill, like Datsyuk, can utilize an elite number of dangerous moves to not just show up on a YouTube compilation, but also to lead to goals, as they so often did. 

One other note on puck skill: this category is also sometimes called "hands". A player with "good hands" is said to be synonymous as a player with high puck skill. They refer to the same concept. 

Hockey IQ

This may be the most difficult to identify, but it essentially refers to how intelligent a player is, how that player thinks the game. Pretty much every scout is going to have their own definition of hockey IQ, and their own way of going about looking for it. It's challenging to describe in layman's terms, and also tough to really show on tape. It simply pops up occasionally throughout a game, as you watch a certain player play. It may be the most subtle skill, nestled inside every play, hidden beneath fast skating, flashy skating, or good hands. But a good scout is able to find it by looking for different indicators of hockey IQ, and I'll run through them in short order: 

• Timing: Making the right move at the right time, not passing too early, but waiting for the play to come to the player.
• Pace: Is the player playing in sync with the others on the ice, or is he rushing ahead of the play, or lagging behind it? Is he thinking at the same speed as the other players?
• Anticipation: This can often be recognized on defense, when a player jumps into a passing lane to intercept an opponent's pass. That's a sign of good anticipation and one of the best indicators of a player with a high hockey IQ.
• Problem-solving: This concept refers to a player's ability to get out of trouble. If they go into a corner with the puck and opponents are cornering them, are they able to get out with possession? When the first plan for a play goes wrong, how good is that player at figuring out what Plan B is going to be? 
• Off-puck positioning: When the player doesn't have the puck, is he putting himself in positions to get it back? Is the player engaged with the play and supporting his teammates, or is he lollygagging off in no-man's land, far away from the play? If the player's team has the puck, is he making sound motions off the puck to get in position to receive a pass? 

These all sum together and make up different aspects of hockey IQ. Every time you see a player make a nifty pass, or intercept a pass from an opponent on defense, or make a good cut away from the puck to receive a pass from a teammate, there's probably a good deal of hockey IQ going on. And if a player is routinely doing the right things with timing, pace, anticipation, solving problems, and being in good positions away from the puck, then you can correctly say that that player has a high hockey IQ. Whereas players who seem to have other tools but are unable to make the right play at the right time may be physically gifted as a skater, shooter, or passer, but lack the high hockey IQ to complete the package. 

Owen Power was born with high marks in the physical category [James Coller]

Physical

Scouts prioritize size and physicality because hockey is an inherently violent game, and the NHL is not an easy league to play in if you can't hold your own physically. There are a lot of huge guys and they will knock you off the puck, push you to the perimeter (away from dangerous areas of the ice), and render you impotent. In the NCAA or other junior leagues, smaller players may not need to throw their weight around. That changes dramatically in the NHL, and as a general rule, the better the league, the more physically demanding it's going to get. Thus, scouts are going to evaluate every prospect on the physical dimension. 

You might think that this just refers to how big a player is, and that's partially true. Guys like Victor Hedman who are just massive (6-6, 229) are going to be able hang in the NHL physically because that's the path nature set forth for them. Big players have some physical advantages, and they are the physical version of what McDavid is to skating or Datsyuk is to puck skill: easy to spot. Anyone who watched 15 minutes of Chris Pronger could tell he was a phenomenal physical player due to his willingness to hit and menacing size. Guys who throw their weight around and love to hit are going to register highly on the physical dimension. That's the way they want to play, to impose themselves physically on the ice and use their body to clear out the netfront. I'm talking about players like say, the great Vladimir Konstantinov: 

But physicality isn't just about hitting, and it's perhaps more interesting to examine with players who aren't big and don't try to hit, because there's also something to be said for strength. Though hitting is a valuable part of hockey, especially for defensemen or forechecking forwards, physicality is as much about hitting the opponent off the puck as it is warding the opponent away on the puck. Strength on the puck, the ability to maintain possession while being hit or burdened by an opponent, is an incredibly valuable skill. Hidden within the greatness of legends like Jaromir Jagr and Sidney Crosby is immense strength on the puck, the ability to go down the wall, get hit by an opponent, and still maintain control. It's also the area that young players (especially NHL prospects in the NCAA) often most need to improve on. Hitting the weight room is key, and this is the skill that can improve the most with proper training. But some players, like Eric Lindros, were born strong on the puck and were fully formed men at age 18: 

So when you're evaluating the physical component of a prospect, I'd look at both the aggressive side, and the possessive side. How often does this player choose to hit? Do they hit effectively and do they prioritize that aspect of the game? And on the flip side, how often do you see them get pushed down? How often do you see a player get knocked off the puck, or go into a corner with possession and come out of it without the puck? If you see a player getting hammered from behind and still stay on the puck, or if they get checked and it's the opponent who ends up laying on the ice, that player probably grades out favorably in the physical dimension. 

The overall evaluation of Brendan Brisson as a prospect is quite good [James Coller]

So how do we evaluate a player overall?

Let's say you've followed all the instructions here and have individual notes and evaluative statements on all six skills. What does that mean for the overall player? Welcome to the $64,000 question. Scouting the individual skills is the easy part... figuring out what it all means is the difficult part. One way to go about is to have a ranking of which skills are most important to you. As a hockey nut, I generally feel that hockey IQ is the most important skill, and physicality is the least important, in terms of determining a great player. A great player can be of any size if they have a high hockey IQ. That's not the case with physicality, and the skill bad players are often best at is physicality. If I had to rank the skills in order of importance, I'd go with hockey IQ, skating, puck skill, passing, shooting, physicality. Not a scientific list, but that's my opinion, just shooting from the hip. As a result of those rankings, I'd be likely to rank a player who was high on IQ and skating but low in shooting and physicality above a player who had those skills in reverse (IQ/skating bad but shooting/physicality good). 

Again, that's one way to go about it. But I will admit that as much as I value hockey IQ, it is not the end-all, be-all. Some players who are incredibly intelligent and oozing puck skill may never be able to play at a certain level if they can't hang with the other players physically or in terms of skating. Some players just aren't fast enough or big enough to make it, no matter how smart or skilled they are. And sometimes we go down the rabbit hole of valuing brains and hands too much and lose sight of how important the physical component is.

All of this said, the reason I prioritize hockey IQ so highly can be summed up by one name: Al Iafrate. Iafrate was a 80s-90s defenseman (a Michigan native) who played a long NHL career for a number of teams, known for his colorful personality and nicknames "The Planet" and "Wild Thing". To me Iafrate is the greatest example of having the tools but not the brain. He seemingly had everything you could want in a player: he was big and played physically, was a great skater for a defenseman, had a blistering and accurate slap shot (maybe the hardest of the 20th century), and had puck skill and passing ability to ignite exciting end-to-end rushes. But he just could never put it all together to become a dominant defenseman. He was good, but never great, underachieving relative to his talent. Iafrate was susceptible to boneheaded mistakes and always suspect defensively. To some observers, it seemed like Iafrate's body moved faster than his brain, and his mind was just fighting to keep up. That's why you need hockey IQ, because without it, a freakishly talented player who has high-end ability in every other skill can go to waste. 

That's why being able to not just identiy each skill, but also how deficiencies in certain skills could doom the overall profile, is so crucial in scouting. A player can wow you in several areas, but another skill may present a red flag that renders everything else moot. These are questions scouts ask all the time. In Kent Johnson's case, they ask whether concerns about hockey IQ (decision-making) and physicality (size) could doom the good passing ability and immense puck skill. Weighing the red flags and weaknesses with the strengths is the hardest job a scout has. 

The final thing I want to say about scouting is focusing on how players blend skills. Essentially, can a player possess several skills and flash them all at once? Can they show their physicality by warding off a check, then pull a deke in the corner to create open space (puck skill), then cut to the lane quickly (skating), and then make a quick, accurate shot for a goal (shooting)? That's a literature example of a singular play blending skill, using the different tools at once, and it's what great players do all the time. Want a modern example? Take this play from Mat Barzal: 

Barzal flashes so many high-end skills at once here. First he shows off his blistering speed by getting to a loose puck before the opponent, even though his opponent was closer at one point in the play (the 0:01 mark). Then he shows off his strength by winning the puck battle and shouldering off a much bigger player (Rasmus Ristolainen) to grab possession (while still skating at a high rate of speed = blending skills!). Then he comes in on the goaltender and pulls a crazy deke, going between the legs with the puck (puck skill!), and then Barzal finishes off the incredible play by sniping top corner over the goaltender's left shoulder (shooting!). And of course, a high hockey IQ is required to even imagine this play, let alone pull it off. So in total, he used five of six skills here in one five second play, and the only reason he didn't utilize passing is because there wasn't a teammate in sight. That's an example of blending skills and using them together. Few players today blend skills better than Mat Barzal. 

I want to close this article off by one last clip of skill blending, from the player who probably had the greatest collection of skills to ever grace the NHL ice, the great Mario Lemieux: 

The size, the speed, the puck skill, the brilliance, the shooting to finish it off. Just impeccable, and shoutout to the incomparable Bob Cole for a legendary call to go with it. Great players can use all the skills at once and blend them together to put together plays of game-breaking caliber. Mario Lemieux was one of the greatest of those players. And scouts should always look for little slivers of Mario in every player they may be watching. 

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That does it for all the piece I have planned to write for this Learning Hockey 2021 series- well sort of. A couple days ago I put up a post on the MGoBoard asking what people would like to learn about hockey and I got quite a few answers. These can be on basically anything, but the central question is, after reading all of my pieces, what didn't I cover that you'd still like to learn about? Is there something small you notice but have never had truly explained? Questions in that vein. 

My goal is to have one final post in this series next week in a mailbag style answering people's questions and if you'd like to submit any questions, feel free to leave them in the comments below in this piece. I will do my best to answer as many as possible in next week's article!