Re: Wisconsin Badgers 2017-2018
What "risks" are you talking about? UW runs a pretty aggressive 2-1-2 for check system. Where on the ice should they be riskier? Should they send all 5 players below the dots in the offensive zone? I don't quite understand what you mean.
That forecheck is fantastic. I love watching it in action, though I love it a lot more when you aren't playing the Gophers. But the purpose of a forecheck is to get the puck back from your opponent. Except in rare instances, a successful forecheck does not lead directly to scoring chances. It's what you do with the puck after getting it back that can do that.
What I see the Badgers doing with it, much like what they do when they bring it into the offensive zone without a numbers advantage, is to set up and start moving the puck around the perimeter. And they keep moving it around the perimeter. Timothy says that they shouldn't ". . . haphazardly force the puck into the middle," but I mostly see them not moving the puck into the middle at all. "Forcing" the puck into the middle isn't a dichotomy, either forcing it or not. It's a matter of risk tolerance. There's always risk involved in getting the puck into dangerous areas; it can easily produce a turnover and go the other way. The question is how much risk is a team willing to accept in order to generate scoring chances.
For Wisconsin, answer is, "Almost none." So they keep moving the puck around the perimeter, looking for that perfect opening. Minnesota has a much higher risk tolerance, born in part out of the fact that they had so much team speed that they could backcheck off those turnovers and prevent the other team from getting into the offensive zone. This is a part of the reason the Gophers have been giving up so many odd man rushes the last several years; they might want to think about being less aggressive.
This system worked great for Wisconsin when they had players like Decker and Knight, who had the ability to find those perfect openings and the talent to create them where others couldn't. It worked pretty well with Turnbull and Ammerman. Starting sometime late last fall, it stopped working well at all. I would have thought that Pankowski and Nurse and Clark were enough to keep it going, but that's not the way it turned out. This year's team looks like last year's, but more so. I don't think they'll be able to score enough to succeed against better teams playing this way.
According to the ratings systems, Minnesota is by far the best team you've played so far, and Minnesota isn't good (though KRACH seems fooled so far). By both KRACH and RPI, Wisconsin's ten other games have been against 5 of the 12 lowest rated teams in Division 1. You're going to destroy those kinds of teams, but if last year is any guide, that isn't going to mean much. I'm very interested to see how you do against Ohio State this week.
