Re: Wisconsin Hockey 2019-20 Part II: Civil War
Since this came up on twitter, something about turnovers and strategy.
It has been shown for a long time that zone entries (entering with possession) highly correlates with more quality scoring chances and therefore more goals. So an offensive objective would obviously be to carry the puck into the zone much more often then you chip or dump and chase. A problem that has arisen though is that high zone entries also correlates very strongly with a high turnover rate. This makes sense of course, because players are reluctant to dump the puck when under pressure and they then give it up more often. Giving turnovers correlates even more strongly with high scoring chances and goals against, though. (Naturally, as turnovers often lead to odd rushes, or at the least, a scrambling, less organised back check.)
When you have a team like the Badgers, who began struggling with high turnover rates, it makes perfect sense then to chip and chase more in an attempt to reduce turnovers and goals against. They have (I think sensibly) moved on a bit from striving for high zone entries and gone more to working more of a controlled dump and chase. (Preferably you put the puck in a spot where you at least create a 50/50 battle for it. ) When they do so consistently, they don't turn the puck over a lot, but, they also aren't particularly adept at, or probably built for, playing that style and they aren't creating a lot of scoring chances. The majority of the top nine aren't really go into the corners against 6'5" D and dig out pucks kind of guys. They are mostly more carry the puck in and get quick scoring chance type of guys.
So what to do? I don't know, it's above my pay grade. Get better at zone entries without turnovers or get better at retrieving pucks, I guess. How they do that quickly I'm not too sure.