NHL Playoffs: Importance of Discipline

On any given day, NHL coaches and players will express the importance of staying disciplined and how staying out of the box will increase the probability of winning games. In the NHL playoffs, with the stakes raised, discipline or lack thereof can make or break teams. Thursday night’s four Game 1s are a prime example.

The eight teams that played Thursday night combined for 28 penalties that led to power-play opportunities for their opponents, with the biggest offenders being the Pittsburgh Penguins with five and the Detroit Red Wings with seven. A lot of these were bad penalties—not as blatant as P.K. Subban’s slash on Mark Stone—but penalties not worth making.

Why?

Well, for starters, the most obvious reason is that taking any type of penalty leaves your team shorthanded. While there were three short-handed goals Thursday night by St. Louis, Detroit and Tampa Bay, most teams spend those two minutes pinned in their own zone, desperately trying to obstruct every shooting lane possible. This means giving up the body, increasing the risk of injury, and having your best forwards glued to the bench. Sidney Crosby played a little more than three minutes in the first period against the New York Rangers because his team took four penalties. Now does that make sense? Of course not! You want your best players on the ice as much as possible. They don’t do anyone any good if they’re not on the ice.

Via Dave Molinari’s article for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

"“Five penalties [overall] certainly swings things in the wrong direction,” defenseman Ben Lovejoy said. “They came out and got a quick goal, and then we took some unnecessary penalties that took ourselves deeper. And we were digging ourselves out the rest of the game.”"

By taking penalties you dig yourself into a hole and sometimes, like the Penguins, St. Blues and Winnipeg Jets learned, you can’t get out. If these teams practiced more discipline, maybe they would have won Game 1 instead of finding themselves behind in the series.

Another reason to stay disciplined: penalties ruin the flow of the game. If you watched the Rangers and Penguins matchup then you know; there was no flow to that game. The stop and go made the game so boring, especially in the first period. The game lacked speed and intensity. If felt like every other minute the referee was blowing the whistle and the game came to a halt. The six penalties in the game, plus the scheduled TV timeouts so the ice could be cleaned, add up and make the game less enjoyable. One of the reasons hockey is so great to watch is the speed the game encompasses. In most games, you can’t turn your head for a second without something major happening.

Penalties can also prevent the players from getting into any type of rhythm. This can lead to sloppier plays and decreased puck control. Sometimes it makes hockey look more like ping pong than anything else with the puck bouncing back and forth in the neutral zone. I want these players’ skills on display for as long as possible. Power plays are great, but so is 5-on-5 hockey. Let’s see more of that moving forward!