The Curious Case of the Broken Breakout

[Unfriendly Ghost]

Figured this deserved its own discussion. Obviously, The Athletic is an awesome paid service, and you should get your own subscription out of respect for their work. Commencing cutting and pasting.

Taken from: 31 Stats: Leafs Cup chances without William Nylander, Patrik...

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The most striking one is happening in Detroit right now. Sznajder mentions it’s still early and he hasn’t tracked enough games yet so the current results might be noisy, but what he has seen is one of the worst teams he’s tracked in terms of defencemen exiting the zone with control. The average controlled zone exit percentage for defenders last year was around 34-to-35 percent, with the worst team in the league being Buffalo at 29.6 percent and Vancouver at 30.3 percent. Detroit was close at 31 percent.
This year the Red Wings have dropped much further and are at 23.3 percent, meaning if a puck is on a Detroit defender’s stick, the team makes it out of the zone cleanly less than one quarter of the time. To put it in further perspective, the Red Wings failed to exit the zone entirely at the exact same rate.
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Note: when posting links like this be careful not to link way too much of the article. This is a paysite, yes we link Athletic articles and I do as well while imploring others to subscribe, but we cannot have entire aricles and 100s of words of text being posted here, it is against the rules.

-TZE

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[SCD]

I was just getting ready to post this, thanks.

It is obvious that from the numbers Cholowski's minutes should be limited.

I was a little surprised with Hronek's numbers, because I thought his play was pretty good in those early games.

 

[TheOtherOne]

I'm not the slightest bit surprised that Big E's patented "see puck: swat at puck" strategy does not often result in puck control.

Interesting seeing the numbers spelled out though. It's great to have one Cholowski but damn, we need another to go along with it.

 

[TheMule93]

i'd like to see these numbers compared to what an average or good defense looks like

 

[SCD]

As the article states, the average breakout was 34-35% for last year. The following is the breakout leaders for last year:

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• Duncan Keith (54.4 percent)
• Drew Doughty (53.4 percent)
• Erik Karlsson (52.3 percent)
• Charlie McAvoy (51.3 percent)
• Zach Werenski (51.0 percent)
• Samuel Girard (50.8 percent)
• Nick Leddy (50.5% percent
• Jaccob Slavin (50.2 percent)

 

[raymond23]

Surprised Green is so low. Not surprised Cholowski is at the top.

 

[19 for president]

Cholo just makes solid plays consistently with thr puck. His passes are almost always right on the tape which helps with the breakout so much. Green and Hronek don't really surprise me. Green is still workng his way into game shape and rythym. Guy has only played 16 games and had no camp, and lets be real his games weak point is in the dzone. Hronek didn't surprise me either he gave up a lot of pucks and was very nervous. Had some great looks in thr Ozone but was very hot potato in the dzone. I think he'll be a lot better in his callup later on this year now that his confidence is growing.

 

[kliq]

This was actually something Smith used to be good at. Couldnt do anything once he got out, but he was great at getting the puck out of his own end. This is definitely one of our greatest weaknesses.

 

[Sadekuuro]

Now that's an interesting stat. Would love to see more data on breakouts and zone entries (in general, not for any specific purpose).

 

[Henkka]

I was just getting ready to post this, thanks.

It is obvious that from the numbers Cholowski's minutes should be limited.

I was a little surprised with Hronek's numbers, because I thought his play was pretty good in those early games.

There's good stats after a bad effort and bad stats after a good effort.

Too small sample size imo.

Only thing that matches with my own eye-test, is Cholowski being great on exits/entries.

 

[WingedWheel1987]

The Wings breakout is bad because they can't make a clean tape to tape pass. Most of the time what happens is, the defenseman receives a sloppy pass or a pass that is a half second slow and that results in them needing an extra half a second to control the puck. That gives the opposing team the time to contest the breakout pass. This usually results in a turnover or an icing.