Hockey tactical board: defensive zone coverage, the breakout, the forecheck and the penalty kill

Why hockey needs a board

Ten skaters and two goalies on a rink, the puck moving faster than anyone can skate, and the players changing every forty seconds or so without the game stopping. A system in hockey is only as good as the line that happens to be on the ice when it is needed, which is why every line has to carry the same picture of it. Explained on the bench, between shifts, that picture reaches the players in pieces. On a board the whole team sees it at once: where each player is, and where the puck is going next.

It also keeps. The breakout drawn in September is the same one in February, and a player called up from the juniors learns it from the same drawing as everybody else.

The rink you draw on

Half a rink, one goal, and the lines that carry the meaning:

• The goal line, four metres from the end boards, with the goal on it and the crease in front of it, a semicircle with a radius of 1.8 metres where the goalie works.
• The faceoff circles in the zone, 4.5 metres in radius, with their dots six metres out from the goal line.
• The blue line, which closes the zone. An attacking player may not cross it ahead of the puck, or play is stopped for offside.
• The centre red line, at the bottom of the half. A puck shot from behind it that crosses the opponent’s goal line untouched is icing — unless the team is a player short.

Your team is in red, the opponent in dark blue, the puck black. The players carry their positions: C is the centre, LW and RW the wingers, LD and RD the defencemen, G the goalie. Your team always plays up the page, so that left and right are the same on the drawing as on the ice: in the attacking zone the opponent’s goal is at the top, and in your own zone the rink is turned and your goal is at the bottom.

Defensive zone coverage

Most teams defend their zone with a mix of man and zone, and it reads best with the puck in a corner. The defenceman on that side goes to the puck and stays between it and the net. The other defenceman takes the front of the net and whoever is standing there. The centre plays low, between the puck and the slot, as the second man on the puck and the first one in front of the net. The wingers stay high: the one on the puck side takes the defenceman at the point, the other sits in the high slot, where a pass from the corner is most dangerous.

When the puck moves along the boards, all five slide with it, and the roles pass from player to player rather than staying with them. That handover is what a board is for: who takes whom when the puck goes behind the net and comes out the other side.

The breakout

Getting the puck out of your own zone is where most goals against begin, because a breakout that fails fails in front of your own net. The defenceman retrieves the puck behind the goal, and has a few seconds and a few options: the winger on the boards on that side, the centre swinging low through the middle, the other defenceman across behind the net, or a stretch pass to the far winger.

A good breakout gives every one of those options at the same moment, so that the forechecker cannot take them all away. That depends on timing — the centre arriving low just as the pass is ready, not a second before — and it is the part of the picture that a still drawing can only point at.

The 1-2-2 forecheck

The forecheck is the breakout seen from the other side: how a team tries to stop the opponent getting out. In a 1-2-2 one forward goes in on the puck carrier and forces them to one side; the other two wait higher, at the tops of the circles, to take away the pass up the boards and the pass through the middle; the two defencemen hold the blue line. It traps more than it hunts, and a team that plays it gives up few odd-man rushes the other way.

The alternatives — two forwards in deep in a 2-1-2, or everyone back in a 1-3-1 — change the whole shape, and the choice depends on who the opponent’s defencemen are and how well they move the puck. That is a decision for the board, made before the game rather than on the bench.

The penalty kill

A minor penalty leaves a team with four skaters for two minutes, and those two minutes are drawn more often than anything else in hockey. The usual answer is a box: two defencemen low, two forwards high, in a square in front of the net that shifts towards the puck and keeps the shooting lanes through the middle closed. The power play answers with its own shape — here a 1-3-1, with a player on the blue line, three across the middle and one in front of the net — and moves the puck to pull the box out of shape.

Short-handed, a team may ice the puck without a stoppage, so every clearance up the ice is worth seconds. Which player pressures, when the box collapses to the net and when it goes after the puck are decisions that have to be the same for every penalty-killing unit, and they are made on a board.

Transition

A turnover in the neutral zone turns defence into attack in a second: the forwards who were backchecking go the other way, a defenceman joins the rush or stays back, and the line on the bench decides whether to change. Each of those is a sequence rather than a position — and a sequence is where drawing on paper stops being enough.

Still or animated

A still drawing shows where everybody should be. An animated one shows when — the centre swinging low as the defenceman turns with the puck, the box sliding as the power play moves it. In hockey that timing is most of the game, which is why those are the drills worth drawing so that they move. How that works, and when arrows on a still picture are enough, is covered in animated drills.

From the board to the session

On most tactical boards the drawing is where the work ends: an image, saved somewhere. In Ultimate Coach it is where the work starts. The breakout you drew becomes a drill, the drill goes into a training session plan, and the session goes into the calendar and out to the squad, who see the same rink and the same movement on their phones before they arrive.