BREAKOUT

“Tonight there’s gonna be a jailbreak, somewhere in this town” I guess I date myself referencing a Thin Lizzy tune, but the song has been stuck in my head all week. Actually I’ve been hearing it all season every time we work on our breakouts. A big challenge this season has been speeding up our offensive play by breaking out long and fast. Simple three point breakouts sometimes slow down the puck, but getting the defense to hit the offense in the neutral zone with a good “thread the needle pass” or a” high board pass” has been a challenge. In our case a strong offensive approach to playing the puck has proven to be a good defense unless we get burnt at the blue line. Keeping the opposing team in their own end does many things for us. First it keeps them out of our end, second it allows us to get more shots on goal, and third we get to control the changes and wear down the defending team by trapping them in the corners. We already know what most teams will try to turn the puck over or break out such as sending the puck up the boards, so we should be ready to shut them down by intercepting the puck. Moving the puck around with good passes is great, but they need to be quick. We’ve also been working on picking up junk pucks that get poke checked or over-skated. Just being aware of these things is not enough; we’ve been drilling them at practice so that we already have some experience recovering our own loose pucks before the other team can get at them. We started this season working on “over speed and under handling the puck”. We have gotten a lot faster, and we do maneuver very well with the puck on our sticks. So far It’s been effective. The whole country seems to have been hit by the flu this past week. Some kind of cold or something hit our team hard this week leaving us with a very short bench yesterday. Yesterday’s game was a loss, but I was impressed by the way the players who did make it in played. Our second period was very good, but by the third it was evident that whatever was hitting the team was affecting our game. The team looked tired, and there was no way we were going to have our best game. I asked that everyone got to bed early last night and got some rest before today’s last regular league game. During the night we found out that our captain would miss today’s game. We really needed him yesterday, but we also need him and the others to get healthy more than win a hockey game. As I got to the rink this morning I found out that we would be short another player who had gotten sick during the night. I let the team know that we needed everyone to give 100% if we were going to have a shot at winning this last game. One thing I like about this team is that they have become a real working team. Today we had to work hard every second of every shift. If one player didn’t give exactly 100% we were not going to make it through the game. They did it, and it was a hard fought game. We kept the pressure up, and never got discouraged when the other team scored. By the third period that goofy Thin Lizzy tune started up in the back of my head every time we moved the puck back down the ice. Even when I asked the players on the ice to hang back during the last minute and a half of the game, It was too late. They were so focused on attacking the other net, that it didn’t matter what I wanted at the end of the game. They weren’t just going to win the game; they were going to WIN the game. They played this game for their captain. They won this game for their captain. They’re a great team, no doubt about that……Breakout!