Speed is brand of this team
Back in May of 2015, Mike Sullivan stepped onstage to deliver the keynote speech at a USA Hockey clinic, sounding more like a college professor than a hockey lifer.
He quoted German proverbs, cited studies on learning done at Cambridge and discussed the myelination process in the central nervous system. You can look up the lecture on YouTube for yourself if you want to learn more about how myelin wraps around nerve fibers to create stronger and faster signals. (Or if you’re just interested in hearing Sullivan say “Dr. George Bartzokis” in a Boston accent).
We’ll focus on hockey for now. Sullivan began the lecture by defining what he believes are the four characteristics of elite hockey players: competitive spirit, functional intelligence, puck possession and speed.
It’s funny. At the time, Sullivan wasn’t even in the Penguins organization. He was a player development coach for the Chicago Blackhawks, almost a decade past his first NHL head coaching job with
the Boston Bruins.
But today, that speech feels like foreshadowing, as if Sullivan was defining his brand of Penguins hockey. Even five years and two Stanley Cup parades later, it’s easy to recognize those characteristics in Sullivan’s Penguins.
“When you look at this group that’s assembled in Pittsburgh, you could most definitely assess our players in those categories,” Sullivan said Monday. “They all rank fairly high. That’s part of the reason these core players have achieved the level of success that they have to this point and built the legacy that they have to this point.”
We’ll focus on just one of those words: speed, which has been a popular topic this training camp.
Over the past year-plus, the Penguins have doubleddown on the speed game that brought back-to-back Cups. They signed Brandon Tanev before the 2019-20 season and he quickly earned the nickname “Turbo.” In the middle of last season, they traded for Jason Zucker, who proudly says he’s not a “fancy EastWest guy.”
It continued this offseason. They traded for defenseman Mike Matheson, thus replacing their slowest leftshot defenseman in Jack Johnson with one whom Sullivan calls “an elite skater.” They brought back quick- twitched forward Evan Rodrigues. And, even though the process to get Kasperi Kapanen to America has been slow, he’ll add yet another infusion of speed to the top-six when he arrives.
Especially in the top-six and on the wings, the Penguins have skaters to play in this system. Consider that Jake Guentzel might be the “slowest” top-six winger — and even that guy has aboveaverage wheels.
With the fleet- footed player in place, the Penguins are trying to play an efficient, north-south game that encourages foot races, flusters opponents on the forecheck and creates opportunities off of loose pucks.
“One thing stands out in camp,” general manager Jim Rutherford said. “We have more guys that have speed.”
But just having fast players doesn’t necessarily make a team fast. This is where those other three characteristics from the USA Hockey lecture — competitive spirit, functional intelligence and puck possession — come into play.
“There are different forms of speed,” Sullivan said. “There’s mind speed first and foremost, your ability to process the game. The guys that can process the game quickly usually have good anticipation skills and reaction skills.
“There’s team speed, your ability to pass the puck. … The puck can move faster than any one person can skate. If we have the ability to change the point of attack and support the puck, then we can improve our team speed in that capacity.”
Only after those first two boxes are checked does foot speed come into play.
So how does this present itself on game night? It starts with the defensemen getting back to pucks with a sense of urgency and quickly finding forwards to race the puck through center ice in transition and create chances in transition.
“Speed comes from not just skating hard but moving the puck fast,“defenseman Marcus Pettersson said. ”That starts with us Dmen not holding onto the puck and not going D-to-D five times. … With the forward group that we have, we want to get it to them as soon as possible.”
Once the puck is on the stick of a forward, look at what can happen. Take the new-look Evgeni Malkin line for example. The star center is playing next to two of the Penguins’ fastest players with Zucker on his left wing and Bryan Rust on the right. Zucker said the two wingers should push the defense back and open up time and space for Malkin to make plays with his creativity.
“It’s a very up-tempo system,“Zucker said. ”[We’re] trying to read plays more and not be very robotic with a lot of things. A lot of it is based on reading plays and just playing hockey.”
“I feel this system is great for me personally, but I feel it really feeds into the entire team that we’ve built here,” Zucker continued. “I think Jim Rutherford and Mike Sullivan and the rest of the coaching staff have put together a great team in the offseason in acquiring a lot of speed and being able to make sure we can play that up-tempo style, especially for 56 games this year.”