It's Time to Dump the Dump and Change

In life, it can be easy not to notice when something is wrong when it feels normal. On a grand scale, it’s easy to forget the societal ills, the combination of social and political failings in healthcare, housing, labor markets, criminal enforcement, and welfare, that funnel vulnerable people into homelessness. In the home, we make excuses for abusers, sometimes blissfully unaware of just how toxic their behavior is until a casual slip of the tongue among friends reveals that, no, that’s not normal. Within ourselves, we can do the same thing, not realizing how harmful our own habits are until confronted with a better way to do things. You should drink more water and be better about brushing your teeth, by the way.

Hockey is no different, being a strange, cold little microcosm of life itself. Luckily it’s not as high stakes as making sure that the world has secure housing, making sure that we separate ourselves from abusers, or even that we have healthy habits. A wiser man than all of us once said that “Is only game.” So we don’t need to stress about it. It’s fun. But it can still teach us a lot about the real world. For one, understanding how much of hockey is luck- that weird bounces of the rubber disc off of misshapen divots in the ice are out of our immediate control, no matter how well we position ourselves, how much we practice, how strong we are, is freeing. When that mentality is applied to real life, it’s easier to accept the shitty and unpredictable bounces of the real world. Sometimes, no matter how good you are, the puck just bounces weird.

With caveats in mind, but acknowledging hockey as a teacher of life lessons, let’s dive into a particular dirty habit that we can rid ourselves of. It happens a dozen times a game, so it can be easy not to notice, but once you spot how bad this play is, you will suffer every time you see it in a game.

I speak of the dump and change. Innocuous, right? The puck is 200 feet away from your goal, you get fresh players on the ice, your coach can fix your matchups. Obviously the play is not going to score you any goals immediately, but it’s better than leaving tired players on the ice to get scored on.

How pragmatic is it really though? When several players change, you vacate the entire neutral zone, leaving all of your fresh players one side of the ice- a quick pass can force them to sprint hard to get into position, negating the value of fresh legs. You’re relinquishing possession. Typically, that’s not a huge deal, because in hockey, possession is always in dispute. But on a dump and change, you are usually sending one forechecker (really half of one a lot of the time if they bail and change too), who on their own can’t do much. The opposition has too many passing options, too large of rushing lanes, and too much security on the puck for one player to contest possession and win the puck.

Let’s do some napkin math. When we have the puck, let’s imagine for the sake of argument that we have a 40% chance of retaining the puck and a 60% chance of turning it over. Our players are tired, under pressure, things don’t look good. Scientific analysis would probably reveal better odds, but play along with me please. Once a team dumps and changes, we’re looking at awful odds of winning the puck back. Let’s be generous and say that our lone forechecker is an impossibly good forechecker- he’s making reads like Mark Stone, throwing hits like Mathieu Olivier, and zipping around like Nick Suzuki. I don’t think it would be controversial to say that a breakout which has a 5v1 advantage is still going to beat that guy more than 60% of the time.

So even with God’s Perfect Forechecker™ on the ice, dumping and changing everybody doesn’t make tactical sense. The obvious decision to make next is to dump the puck and just change fewer players at a time. The most conservative variation of that strategy would be to dump and change just one player at a time. While changing players this way off the rush or off of an offensive zone cycle is pretty close to optimal, dumping and then attempting to chase with just 4 players is conceding a short powerplay. Fellow hockey blogger Arik Parnass has delved into the success rate of teams breaking out on the powerplay pretty deeply. I highly recommend you read his work. If you’re too busy, the gist for our purposes is that teams breaking out 5v4 gain the offensive zone a lot. Less effective strategies get in around 55% of the time, most moves gain the zone well over 75% of the time. Sending the puck deep and then getting off is not putting the puck 200 feet from your goal, it’s putting the puck 200 feet from your goal until the other team gets it. Then it’s just coming back to your end.

Even making some tactical adjustments, dumping and changing is a losing play. You’re almost certainly giving up possession, and that possession is almost certainly coming back into your zone. That’s if the play goes well. Sometimes the play goes horribly wrong- a huge vertical channel opens up in the ice on the penalty box side, the puck goes up, and the other team has a very dangerous rush- a breakaway, a 2v0, a 3v1, something bad. Most coaches, when presented with the option of “maybe get a 2v1, maybe give up a 2v1” would not take that trade. For some reason, when presented with the option of “definitely get a line change, maybe give up a 2v1” they willingly accept it as the cost of doing business.

Things don’t have to be this way. Let’s imagine the alternative ways of doing business. If players are coached that when tired in the neutral zone, they cannot dump and change, they are left with 3 other options:

1. Take longer shifts
2. Euro the puck
3. Get a face-off

Let’s break these down.

1. Take Longer Shifts

On the surface, this seems like the worst option. Players are able to skate faster and make better decisions when they take shorter shifts. A player with the puck in the neutral zone who tries to play through or dump and chase is not going to be as successful. They may get so tired that they lose focus and make an even worse line change. They could get caught in their zone and get hemmed in for an extended period of time.

Thinking about it a little deeper, it could be less bad than it sounds though. If players stagger their shifts, such as by changing while their team is cycling in the offensive zone, the theoretical damage from tired players is going to be lessened- at any one moment, fewer players will have been on the ice too long.

Tactical changes can also help with energy management. For example, if teams wanted to play 90 second shifts (unheard of in modern hockey, but relatively common historically), they could play fast in the first 45 seconds, pushing the tempo with the puck, forechecking hard, and playing an aggressive defense, then slow down in the second 45, pulling the puck behind their goal to slow tempo, playing a trap, and collapsing the defensive zone.

Teams could also be more adventurous tactically, especially with how positionally fluid modern players are. Imagine a team carried a roster of 4 centermen and 7 pairs of wing-fencemen: players who started their shift as forwards playing hard, then filtered back to defensemen as their energy waned, then went to the bench. It wouldn’t be unheard of in sports- a similar system is sometimes used in box lacrosse, although the specialized offense-defense system is more common. In soccer, wingbacks blend traditional fullback and winger roles. A concerted effort would need to be made to play hockey that way, but it could open up new avenues tactically even outside of just not wasting possessions with dump and changes.

2. Euro the Puck

This parlance is often used derogatorily. It refers to a style of hockey which is more prevalent on Olympic-sized ice surfaces, more commonly found in Europe than in North America. On such ice surfaces, teams intuited that the dump and chase is a low-percentage proposition: with so much width on the ice, wingers can easily find a pocket of space and break the puck out. In response to this, teams would rarely, if ever, dump the puck for a dump-and-chase, preferring instead to regroup the puck when stalled in the neutral zone. These plays are not aesthetically pleasing. Passes go backwards, the pace of play crawls to a halt, and there is very little interaction between the offense and the defense. This led the Don Cherry types, the cro-magnons of hockey, obsessed with violence more than victory, to deride that style of play. You’re not dumping the puck in and making contact after all. It’s soft. Cowardly.

I must confess, I like a dump and chase. As a player, it was a play that I really enjoyed, and statistically, it drives down the event rate of the game, reducing shots for both teams. It’s a decent play, although less valuable overall than carrying the puck in and creating offense. In the aggregate, the Euro is probably better. But for changing lines, it’s certainly better. Forechecking 4v5 is statistically difficult, but making a backwards pass 5v5, then holding the puck 4v5 for a little while is not. Do that a couple of times, and not only have you completed a line change and held the puck, but you’ve extended the shift of your opponents. Now they are more likely to be tired. Now whatever strategy you choose to use, be it to regroup until an opportunity arises or to just go vertical and take what the defense gives, it will be more effective.

The downside to this is that it chews clock- if your team is down late and needs to score, this is not optimal (neither is a dump and change, but we want to play as efficiently as possible in those scenarios). Of course, if your team is leading, that’s an added benefit.

3. Get a Face-Off

Coaches are always saying, “Get the puck on net!” Fans are always saying, “Shooooot!” They may be right- this could actually be a better play than the old-fashioned dump-and-chase. The idea is pretty straightforward. Fling the puck at the net, and have that lone forechecker give one final effort to pressure the goalie into freezing it. In order to work, the puck will need to move slow enough that our forechecker can get there at the same time and aimed towards the goalie’s chest or glove to force them to freeze play. Just a regular potshot won’t do, because the goalie will keep it in play and it will be no different than a dump-and-change.

If the team can successfully put the puck into the opposing goalie’s glove and get a person into the goalie’s face, the possible outcomes start to look really good.

Option A: the goalie fumbles it right into our guy. He’s all alone, and he can rag the puck long enough for a change, draw a penalty from frantic defenders collapsing on the net, or potentially just score.

Option B: the play is blown dead. Our team gets a line change and a face-off in the offensive zone. Depending on the quality of face-off takers, it’s a roughly 50/50 puck now. Teams that win offensive zone face-offs statistically have a high rate of generating offense for the next few seconds. Worst case, we lose the face-off, but players are fresh and in position, a drastically better outcome than the dump and change.

The trouble is in the execution. How does our dumper get the puck to the opposing goalie? A direct shot is the most accurate option, but it will likely be too fast, reaching the goaltender before our forechecker can apply pressure. The goalie can then just play the puck and our F1 is now even more tired. Another option would be to loft the puck on goal. This is much easier to time, and very likely that the goalie would rather glove it than risk letting it touch the ice and bounce. The issue is that this is a difficult skill, and it’s just as likely that our dumper launches the puck over the goal, sends it short to be intercepted, or misses wide for a regular dump into the corner as it is to actually succeed. Another choice is to chip the puck low, hoping to bounce it along to the net. This risks interception from defenders, and while it solves the problem of shooting too long or short, it’s still likely to go wide left or right. In any case, the play would need to be practiced to be successful.

What should teams do instead of dumping and changing? I’m not sure. But they need to stop it. Next time you watch a game, keep an eye out- when teams do this, how often are they really benefiting from it?