Your player analogy is imperfect because in your telling, coach X has irrational love for player X while few or no other coaches share that sentiment. But plenty of coaches (a majority? All?) seem to feel face offs are important.
(WARNING: baseball scenario incoming. Skip to the next bolded line if you want to avoid it.)
When I played baseball back when I was a kid, there was a huge emphasis on catching a fly ball
the right way: two-handed. And for the better part of a century, that's how it was taught all the way to the highest levels, well past the point that it was necessary. Two-handed fielding of a fly ball was important back when gloves had minimal support and no webbing to speak of, because there was the chance that even a well-played ball would pop loose and you'd have to be able to barehand it.
This basically stopped being a problem before WWII, but for another 30 or 40 years, it was still this outward sign of playing
fundamental baseball
the right way. Guys who fielded a ball this way were praised for being a guy who embraced the little things, guys who didn't were slammed for everything from attitude problems to laziness to whatever else happened to be said.
It wasn't until really getting into the 1970s when managers like Weaver and Herzog basically said, "Yeah, this is stupid. It actually puts you in a worse position to make a play and doesn't do anything positive" that things started to change.
(END BASEBALL)
I question whether the huge emphasis on faceoff wins is actually detrimental. Yes, in an ideal world your center would cleanly win the draw, prevent his opponent from setting up in transition, and your team would gain possession either to get a shot away or to clear the defensive zone.
But roughly 50% of the time, your team isn't winning the draw. And a good chunk of the remainder isn't going to be a clean win by any means; it'll be disjointed. And plenty of other times, your team isn't going to have possession within one second of the puck dropping anyway.
I'd be curious to see how a team would do if they basically conceded a faceoff in certain scenarios and just set up entirely for a defensive situation. Figure that enough teams concede possession a couple dozen times a game as it is by dumping the puck into the corner from somewhere in the offensive area of the neutral zone, and it's not like that's believed to be detrimental to the team.
It won't happen, but I'd be interested to see it.
I disagree with your last point, because a won face off that leads to the winning team having possession of the puck entirely until a goal is scored is a big part of that goal being scored.
In this particular scenario, yes. But how often does it happen that a team gains possession off the draw and doesn't relinquish it until the puck goes into the net?
