LB-Hockey

The NHL has trended back to putting increased emphasis on heavy play in recent years. Look no further than the Florida Panthers’ current dominance, or absence of short defensemen selected in recent drafts. However, it’s not exclusively about having an imposing frame or leaving your post to hit everything that moves. Physicality requires awareness, aim, and most importantly, purpose. So how do the best of the best hone this skill, and where do they most apply it?

What Are the High-Contact Areas?

On the ice, there are plenty of zones synonymous with grittier play. But the necessity for inflicting pressure and shouldering contact is equally based in situation as much as location, it’s not just limited to grinding out pucks along the boards. This means that when we’re looking to establish these “high-contact areas”, we’re isolating for regions AND game states that call for an increased level of physical willingness & battling prowess.

In this project, we’ve isolated six different categories of plays that will help us. They fit the following criteria:
A) Can be quantified using publicly available datasets
B1) Implies direct contact with an opposing player
OR
B2) Occurs in an often highly contested area of the ice
C) Encompasses successful plays that improve the team’s position in the game

Although there are evidently more disciplines that could qualify here, these selections are actively measured and have accessible data through the public sphere. In this case specifically, that’s either through the NHL API or AllThreeZones, which are fundamental resources. We would obviously love to measure puck-protection instances or forced-shot pressures, but these do not get tracked at a large enough scale for us to use. With all of this outlined, let’s dive into these high-contact areas.

1. Proactive Contact Peripherals
The first category falls more into the “when” rather than the “where” bucket. These are commonly-known peripherals (often found in most boxscores for example) where a skater proactively makes contact on-puck with an opposing carrier in some way to impede their progress. This can be directly applied to the carrier through a hit and stick-check, or indirectly by obstructing a shooting lane, thus resulting in a block. Penalties drawn are also included here as they are often the result of a player successfully inviting contact and forcing their opponents’ hand (whether purposefully or not).

2. Transition Contests
Up next are pressured plays in transition. When against the puck, this takes the form of entry targets where the defender rapidly closes space on the carrier to deny possession past the blue line. Meanwhile, examples with the puck are mirrored where the carrier is subject to pressure but successfully maneuvers through it for a successful breakout.

3. Forechecking Engagement
The following couple have been separated into their own sections but have a similar focus: the forecheck. This one encapsulates the initial engagement off of forecheck commitments, including puck recoveries, pressures onto opposing defensemen’s retrieval attempts, and disrupted exits. Prototypical checking forwards will especially thrive in these metrics, as their crash-&-bang style of play is well-represented with the common battles here.

4. Forecheck Offence
Once possession has been gained off those forechecks, we can shift to more offensive-leaning skills. This transition from applying pressure to creating from within the chaos is the main focus of this category, as we isolate for chance creation off forecheck involvement. Whether that’s with shots or assists, this prioritizes the blending of physical leverage, puck control, and processing to reward skaters with the ability to quickly shoulder between skills in a suffocating environment.

5. Down-Low Playmaking

We also know that passes from behind the net lead to goals at a higher rate than other passing plays.

– Corey Sznajder regarding Ryan Stimson’s Passing Project^[1]

Maneuvering contact is also rather important during offensive zone cycles. On the puck-movement side, the goal-line playmaker has become an important commodity in today’s game. Bumper plays relying on touches between the boards and net headline multiple powerplay strategies, cross-crease threads through the lower-slot are the endgame for a plethora of set plays. Those passes originating from low in the zone improve teams’ scoring states^[1], and require comfort in one’s ability to wade through tight spaces consistently.

6. Net-Front Presence
Lastly is the type of offence most synonymous with grit: the net-front game. It’s at the core of Chris Kreider, Zach Hyman, & Brady Tkachuk’s playing styles, and that’s thanks to a powerful mix of body positioning, situational awareness, balance, and puck skills. Their volume-of and finishing-on rebounds, tips, and deflections are what’s being used to quantify this. Defencemen are not forgotten here, as a mirrored version of this score is used for them. Their performance is measured by how efficiently they can suppress chances close in front of their goalie. This can be achieved through establishing strong positioning, boxing out, or tying up sticks.

Building the Battle Grid

Now that we’ve set all of our pieces on the board, it’s time to play. Using the tracked events outlined in each section, we can measure the rate at which every skater performs them. We then standardize, regress, and combine them using a weighted average prioritizing play frequency, repeatability, and potency (weights differ for forwards and defenders).

This gives us overall scores for each of our six aforementioned categories, and another encompassing all of them into a one-number metric, which we’ve titled “Play Through Contact”. It captures skaters who are often willing to engage in high-contact areas and consistently succeed when pressured with the puck. Those of you familiar with our multi-year cards will recognize it as a mainstay in the Checking category. But the latest feature comes in the form of a brand new visualization: The Battle Grid.

The dashboard outlines each of the high-contact areas we’ve defined, as they are placed at common locations on the ice where these tend to occur. This further helps interpretation by highlighting frequent battle spots, pressure points, and generally physical zones on the ice. These categorical measures, along with the final Play Through Contact score, are shown in percentiles by position for the selected player and season.

How Can It Supplement Our Player Analysis?

For Team Success in the Playoffs

The playoffs are known to host a generally tougher and more physically draining game. Open ice is seldom found, all loose pucks are contested, and pressure is applied in the blink of an eye. With this faster rate at which leeway shrinks, the necessity for a skater to fight for every inch of space becomes imperative.

Player size has often been used as a proxy for estimating physical potential and grit, which should result in increased playoff triumph. That intuition is indeed backed up with some solid data, as David Johnson’s research shows here, here, and here. But looking at recent cup-winning trends, there may be more to unravel, and that’s where our new metrics can help.

As mentioned in the opening paragraph, the current Panthers’ dynasty heavily relies on a suffocating style of play. We talked ad nauseam about the intensity of their forecheck in our last article, but it doesn’t end there for Florida. The forwards not only thrive at hounding pucks along the boards, but also create chances within that chaos unlike any other group. Meanwhile, their defencemen consistently outplay opposing forechecks, rarely allowing dumps to be recovered, let alone chances off of those. Even in transition and open ice their shutdown pressure is prominent, as the back-to-back cup winners held the best entry denial and entry chance defence rates league-wide in 2024-25.

So already, at the team-level, this new data and visualization help bridge the stats & eye test even further by filling in the gaps of physicality and adding another level of contact play to our realm of analysis.

In Player Development

As for its purpose in player development, Will Smith’s rookie outing offers up a compelling case study. While it ended up being a success according to the large majority of folks, things looked a little gloomier at the start of the season.

For a good portion of the year, the San Jose rookie seemed to be playing scared: pucks never stayed on his stick very long, his defensive zone involvement was negligible, and he rarely applied pressure to opposing carriers facing him. All around, he avoided most physical elements of the game and never proactively set out to create opportunities where he would have to rely on applying contact in any way.

In his defence, that is one of the toughest steps in a player’s transition to the NHL. No other hockey league demands as much physicality and pace in its on-ice play. For example, in our dataset, young defencemen tend to struggle most when these two factors combine as they usually grade poorly in the rush defence metrics. Compound this speed and grit of the game with the schedule density, and it can inhibit levels of exertion & exhaustion that require a very long time to adapt for new players.

In Will’s case specifically, he was still maximizing almost everything outside of this area. Sure, there was panic when time & space shrank around him, and that was evident by his replacement-level Play Through Contact score. Nonetheless, he thrived in open pockets of space. His creation on entries was strong, the passing was already above average, and if he had time to settle and release pucks, his finishing was first-line-worthy.

His greatest skill came where he would be the least susceptible to immediate pressure: when his teammates held the puck in the offensive zone. Smith was consistently able to get open as a high-danger pass recipient leading to shots; not only creating chances for himself but also acting as a decoy, which provides his linemates with even more space for themselves. This culminated in him attaining a top-25 Off-Puck Offensive Support rating league-wide.

This is especially impressive given it all seemed to be done a fair distance away from the lower slot, as indicated by his very low Net-Front Play.

And shortly after the calendar turned, Will learned to invite contact more frequently and hold on to pucks a little longer, allowing him to utilize his gravity over the opposition’s defence. As a playmaker, this opened up more options than previously available when he offloaded pucks at a far too rapid rate. On the scoring side, it increased his willingness to get involved on the forecheck and generate chances off of those recoveries. That’s reflected in the offensively-leaning areas of his 2024-25 Battle Grid, with the Forecheck Offence & Down-Low Playmaking jolting up to above-average by season’s end.

Yes, there’s more to do such as continuing to blend his skating and handling prowess off the rush with this newly-found willingness to invite contact for further advantage creation if he wants to reach that top level. But already the Sharks rookie has undertaken a huge step which saw him as one of the biggest risers in our data through 2024-25’s second half.

Most importantly, this enhanced ability to play through contact hasn’t just impacted a couple of skills, but rather his entire game. Looking at his Consistency Spread, once the data stabilized after his first 5-or-so tracked outings, his decayed average sharply improved with no sign of turning back. It just goes to show how important adding this extra physical dimension to a skater’s arsenal can be for their evolution into an impactful NHLer, no matter their core style of play.

Overall, this new data seems to open the door for a more refined evaluation of player development, especially in terms of acclimating to contact at the NHL level and potential future improvements in that space.

The Battle Grid includes skater data ranging from the 2020-21 season to now, and will be updated beyond that as new seasons play out. It can be freely accessed by anyone, either directly linked here or at our Free Tools page, which continues to host all available dashboards descending from LB-Hockey articles.