The Flyers have Kevin Patullo Syndrome
Fans of the Eagles will be all too familiar with Kevin Patullo Syndrome. It’s a sickness that targets a team’s offensive aptitude and eats away at that aptitude until only incompetence remains.
Kevin Patullo managed to turn one of the world’s most talent-laden offenses into a bastion of ineptitude and the apex of impotence. It’s one of the defining examples of poor coaching and poor structure simply being too much for even all-world talent to break through.
Kevin Patullo Syndrome
It’s easy to see how a coach in football, specifically Kevin Patullo, can wreck a team’s offense. They quite literally call the plays out of a huddle. The players are, in many ways, dancing on strings. Marionettes for the designs of the offensive architect. Hockey has a reputation of a fully free-flowing game, but that isn’t quite true.
Underneath of the chaos, there’s a structure. Even in the ways that teams attack. Under the madness, there’s always a method and the Flyers’ method is incompetence.
First, let’s start with the results.
The Flyers have scored the 17th most goals in the league at 5v5, and have thus far, come so close to achieving perfect mid. Here’s the problem with that.
They’ve accomplished this by being 9th in overall team shooting percentage, an impossible feat given the level of talent they say they don’t have on the roster.
What do you mean you’re a long way from Tampa’s level? You’re converting only 1.5% fewer chances than Tampa! You’re one of the league’s elite sharpshooting teams!
Or maybe you’re not. And maybe you know that.
In terms of generating offense, the Flyers are one of the very worst in the league. At this point, they sit 29th in the NHL in expected goals per hour. For the most analytically inclined among you, you’ll know that the expected goal model has been a bit wonky this year and generally inflated.
But if you double check with shot attempts, that still holds true. The Flyers are 29th in the NHL in shot attempts created per hour.
Not shots on goal.
ATTEMPTS at shooting.
They can’t create a damn thing, and the only reason they don’t have horrifically poor goal scoring right this very second is because they’ve been getting bounces. That dries up. It is drying up, as we speak.
After putting up 10 goals on Edmonton and Anaheim, they’ve scored 4 goals in their last 3 games. With a back-to-back on the horizon against two hot teams in Buffalo and Pittsburgh, I wouldn’t bank on that trend changing so soon.
The problem the Flyers have is with the way they attempt to score goals. The vaunted “piston offense” is not firing on very many cylinders.
First of all, that name is incredibly ambiguous and doesn’t really describe what they mean. Here’s the Flyers’ offensive zone philosophy.
When they recover a puck along the wall, that puck is filtered to the point. The defenseman is supposed to beat the winger checking them laterally and then fit a shot through the two forwards sent to screen the goalie.
From there, broken plays and seeing eye shots are supposed to occur in abundance and we’re all supposed to be going deaf from the sheer frequency of goal songs blasting out our ear drums.
Here’s the Flyers executing the “piston offense” with the fourth line out there.
Here’s some more “piston offense,” this time resulting in a Nick Seeler goal.
No NHL team goes right into their offensive zone sets the second they gain the puck on a controlled entry. Here’s Michkov carrying the mail and making people miss all to set up some “piston offense,” this time with more predictable results.
A lot of the Flyers’ best offensive sequences come from players simply ignoring their mandate entirely, the Travis Konecny special. This time, Konecny is supposed to be covering for Sanheim, who’s activated into the play as one of the forwards.
With Dvorak as the puck carrier, that means Sanheim and Zegras go to crowd the net-front. They do.
But instead of making Dvorak stretch the pass to the point, Konecny activates into the slot and gets a beautiful chance that he buries.
The reason Zegras and Konecny are both producing the way they are is because they’re the two players who routinely go rogue, and color outside the lines. Here, the “piston offense” shape is looking almost complete.
But Zegras calls his own number instead of deferring to the point shot, and Konecny goes to the back post instead of trying to disrupt the goalie. The two deviations from the norm lead to a hook up for a beautiful goal.
All in all, Zegras’ assists are down this year. And that’s because he doesn’t actually have the ability to go rogue… all the time. Sometimes, he has to play within the system. And playing within the system looks a lot like threading an impossible needle to get Nick Seeler a point shot.
Sometimes, it miraculously finds pay dirt, as it does here.
Here’s some more “piston offense” right off the draw. Sanheim doesn’t even give the traffic chance to present itself before he fires that slapshot. Under no circumstances should that ever go in, but sometimes you get the bounces.
This is a system built for a transcendent offensive defenseman who has both the feet to claim space laterally in a blur and the puck skills to shoot precisely while in motion to create a broken play.
It’s a system built for Quinn Hughes and Cale Makar. I can’t picture any defensemen in the league running it effectively. They all either lack the hands or the feet.
The Canucks were a really good offense with Hughes on the ice, and an absolutely inept offense without him. The Flyers are kind of the same, except they don’t employ Quinn Hughes. So they’re just awful at generating in-zone offense all of the time.
A lack of in-zone offense might be forgivable if it was compensated for with a plethora of rush chances. The Flyers are one of the worst rush teams in the league.
They went from a team that generated outrageous amounts of rush offense to nearly none at all, and the entire reason is that the system now has different priorities.
As it pertains to offensive zone entries: “Where is the open ice? If it’s in front of the defeneman, there’s creative license to make a play. If the defender(s) pressures and there’s “soft ice” (unguarded space) behind the defense, it calls for a dump-in and forechecker pursuit.
The goal is NOT “dump and chase” hockey. Rather, it’s read and react with a chance to attack with pace. Players look first for where the open ice is. If there’s room, the Flyers attackers look for direct passes. It’s about quick movement to create high-danger chances. Put another way, it’s a give-and-go attack mentality if there’s space. However, if it’s a 1-on-2 or tightly pressured situation, that’s where chip-and-chase applies.
It’s all about recognition and reaction to when to take a calculated risk vs. when to play it safer.“
As an aside, I find it almost insulting to my intelligence that they spent three paragraphs trying to tell me that dump-and-chase hockey isn’t dump-and-chase hockey.
Either way, what they’re saying here is that the Flyers will dump the puck in whenever there’s a tight gap in the neutral zone.
Here’s the problem: this is the NHL. There’s always a tight gap in the neutral zone.
“Space behind” the defenseman, in this scenario, is akin to a wide open 20% 3-point shooter in the corner. That guy is open for a reason.
The space behind the defenseman is open for a reason. They want you to dump it in, so they can immediately remove the most dangerous form of NHL offense.
Good offenses find a way to get a better shot. They take space that you don’t think is there and then use that to put defenses in rotation and find the open man amidst the chaos.
Overall, I find it to be something of a joke that we go running around, looking for various players to harangue for the team not scoring more goals.
When the problem is that the team doesn’t play a style of hockey conducive to scoring goals.
It’s been over half the season. And the results of Rick Tocchet hockey are the exact same as they were everywhere else.
Without a run of insanely hot shooting, his teams are helpless offensively. They can’t score. Because they can’t score, they can’t win.
Join The Chase
Read More
Here’s the real problem with the Flyers 0-1-1 start
On the surface, starting 0-1-1 isn’t the worst thing in…
The NHL handed Trevor Zegras a penalty for “improperly wearing equipment” because his jersey was tucked into his pants
Leave Trevor Zegras alone, NHL. You typically don’t see this…
Comments (0)