Cale Makar and blowing up a forecheck
What can Cale Makar teach us about what to look for in junior-aged defencemen?
Understanding exactly what makes successful NHLers so good has obvious implications on draft analysis— with that in mind, I’ve spent the last few days working through Cale Makar video on InStatHockey. Makar is a natural starting point. I’m a very strong believer that the value of NHL defencemen is most directly related to their effectiveness in the transition game, and Makar may just be the best defenceman in the entire NHL in that area. I mean, this is his transitional profile from his rookie season! Incredible. Chart via CJ Turtoro, data from Corey Sznajder.
The best clip I came across was this one:
This is called “blowing up a forecheck”, and it’s one of the most promising things a defenceman at any level can do. This is when you render a forecheck completely ineffective; you wanna make it entirely fail on all counts-- and that Makar clip is a perfect example. Rendering a forecheck totally ineffective starts with recognizing what a forecheck is trying to do. F1 wants to crash you in the corner and ideally create a puck battle. If he does that, the forecheck has already won outright. Most defencemen are reasonably good at responding to F1 though and don't roll over that fast. F1's secondary goal is to force you up the boards, and it's generally pretty easy to do this.
F1 chases Makar around the net and forces him to choose a side of the ice that he's going to try to break out of. That's a pretty good result for him-- he's now creating an advantage for the defence because they have limited the breakout to only half of the ice surface. F2's job is to sustain that advantage-- don't give the breakout a chance to cut back towards the other side of the ice by continuing to angle the puck carrier further into the boards. And this is where Makar sends this forecheck to the wastebin-- F2 isn't expecting him to be as quick as he is and utterly fails to angle Makar towards the boards. When F2 angles the puck carrier effectively, F3 is able to step up knowing that he's challenging a player with nowhere to go. But by beating F2 with his speed, Makar created options for himself and now he gets to make F3 look silly. This is a masterclass in countering a forecheck. F1 creates an advantage by forcing Makar to limit himself to one side of the ice. F2 tries to sustain and increase that advantage by angling Makar into the boards, but Makar easily outskates him, creating a lane towards the middle of the ice. When F3 steps up, Makar uses that lane and is now through into open ice, having just beaten all three layers of the opponent’s forecheck. Makar took an advantage for Vegas and turned it into a major advantage for Colorado through speed, confidence, and puck skills, but mostly just speed.
Only the elite, elite transitional defencemen of the NHL-- such as Cale Makar-- are capable of consistently blowing up NHL forechecks like this. But in a draft/prospect context, a junior prospect who should be a good NHLer down the road is probably one of the elite players in his respective league. A universal principle for prospect evaluation that spans all sports: the players who project to be very good at the highest level tend to be the ones who make their current level look far easier than it should be (things are more wrinkled for European pros and NCAA players, but for CHL/USHL/European junior this holds true around the top of the draft). So if we're thinking about drafting a CHL defenceman in the top ten because we project him to be above-average in transition, we should be seeing him blow up CHL forechecks. If that player has to work hard just to create small advantages on the breakout at the CHL level, he'll have to work several times harder to create those same advantages against an NHL forecheck. But a player that can create large advantages against CHL should be able to create small ones against an NHL forecheck down the road without having to develop any major new skills and work significantly harder.