Tactics: Tomas Pacina's Puck Possession Philosophy
Puck possession hockey is more than just about the Xs and Os, it's a mindset
Tomas Pacina is one the smartest hockey minds in the world. Having worked with several NHL organizations as a skills coach, he most recently led the Czech national women’s team to their first Olympic participation in program history.
A few days ago, Greg Revak published a new episode of his Hockey IQ podcast which featured a very insightful interview with Pacina. Listening to this interview, I was able to reflect on some of my own experiences working as a player development analyst, scout & video coach for different hockey organizations around the world.
Throughout the years, a lot of coaches have talked to me about wanting to implement “puck possession hockey” into their systems. But only a few coaches I’ve worked with have successfully achieved this feat. Often times, the main cause of these unsuccessful implementation attempts has been that the problem wasn’t tackled in the right order.
In the podcast episode, Pacina introduced a very interesting framework to implement puck possession hockey (but also any other hockey philosophy) in a successful manner.
The Mindset
First and foremost, puck possession hockey, before diving into the Xs and Os, the Corsi and the xG stats, is a psychological and spiritual mindset for Pacina. It is a mindset revolving around domination.
With the Czech national women’s team, Pacina came in with the premise of wanting to dominate games.
Indeed, it takes courage and confidence as a team to go out there, shift after shift, and attempt to continuously control play. There is a fine line between confidence and arrogance, but if coaches want their players to play with confidence, they need to earn their players’ trust. And to earn the trust of their players, coaches themselves need to be confident in what they are doing.
Confidence as a coach starts with preparation, but it goes way beyond that. Earning the trust of your players, as a coach, starts with knowing your hockey and communicating it clearly. But it’s also about all these little interactions that could occur both on and off the ice and that may have everything or nothing to do with hockey. There are different ways to do it, but from my experience, it always comes down to the same few things.
As a coach, openness, willingness to listen, clear communication and honesty with yourself, your players and your staff will show that you trust them and will help you earn their trust. Most of the time, that is the best way to start building confidence as a team and have your organization buy into your philosophy.
But, as Pacina sees it, building confidence and earning the trust of your players, is only the first step in ensuring that your philosophy translates into on-ice results.
The Skills
Once you have a philosophy with a team, you need to know what skills your players need to have to efficiently execute the game plan on the ice.
Pacina describes, in the quote above, the step that precedes figuring out the Xs and Os when trying to implement puck possession hockey (or any other hockey philosophy). If the players on your team don’t have the enabling skills to execute your game plan, there will be a mismatch and your philosophy will not yield positive on-ice results.
But for me, when considering the constraints under which hockey teams have to operate, this problem can be spun in 2 different ways:
Scenario 1: Based on the skills that your players currently possess, what should your tactical philosophy be?
Scenario 2: Based on your tactical philosophy, what are the skills that your players need to develop?
In the first scenario, your philosophy is tailored to the current strengths of your players.
In the second scenario, your players will need to develop certain (potentially new) skills to be able to optimally perform within your systems.
Intuitively, scenario 1 makes sense to start off a season. However, this choice doesn’t mean that your philosophy can’t evolve throughout a season or even multiple seasons. Helping your players develop more advanced skills could allow them to optimally perform more complex and higher value plays, which down the road could re-shape your tactical philosophy.
As such, in the long run, finding the right balance between tailoring your philosophy to your players’ strengths and innovating through player development is the way of staying ahead of the curve.
But it all starts with research to gain an understanding of the different skill sets of your players and the dynamics of your team. As such, when taking on a new coaching or analyst job, the first thing that should be done is to sit down and study your roster to understand its strengths and weaknesses.
Circling back to puck possession hockey, according to Pacina, these are the key skills that enable the optimal implementation of this style of play:
Quality passing and puck reception (to move the puck efficiently)
Skating skills (to support the puck efficiently)
Puck protection skills (to retain the puck efficiently)
The Tactics
Once your philosophy is set and you’ve ensured that your players buy into your plan and have the skills to optimally implement it, then it’s time to finally design your systems and your structure.
Without going into too much detail, puck possession hockey is built around high value play driving and puck moving sequences that ultimately yield interesting OZ opportunities by continuously improving the condition of the puck. But successful puck possession hockey is also about efficient high value plays on both sides of the puck (to limit the possession time of the opponent).
Looking at Tomas Pacina’s puck possession hockey philosophy with the Czech national women’s team, here are two interesting tactical elements he incorporated in his systems:
The Assessment
We are never done learning and working on ourselves […] emotionally, spiritually and mentally.
Finally, the last step of the process is to assess the results of your team. That can be done through video and stats (with Corsi and xG share, when emphasizing puck possession) to assess the performance and suitability of your philosophy in the context of your team. From there, adjustments can be made if needed.
But as a coach, the assessment (or self-assessment) step is also about personal development which goes way beyond stats and score sheets. It’s about learning how to communicate, how to teach and ultimately how to positively contribute to a player’s development.
At the end of the day, we’re all human beings and we make mistakes. Whether it’s behind the bench, in the stands or on video, we’re imperfect people coaching imperfect players taking part in a game where randomness can be king.
So when our mistakes inevitably happen, the learning process is all about ensuring that we don’t repeat the same mistakes if a similar situation presents itself down the road.