Ethan Bear, Mackenzie Weegar, and blowing up the forecheck via the pass
What Ethan Bear, Mackenzie Weegar, and their teammates can teach us about blowing up the forecheck in a different way
On Monday, we talked about Cale Makar’s rare ability to utterly disassemble a forecheck through his elite combination of mobility, puck skills, and confidence.
We dubbed this ‘blowing up a forecheck’, because Makar bypassed all three opposing forwards like it was nothing. But you don’t need to be Cale Makar— or be able to skate like him— to blow up a forecheck. A less extraordinary, more common, and probably more practical way to bypass a forecheck is via the pass, and a few clips from Ethan Bear and Mackenzie Weegar (plus their d-partners) allow us to extract the blueprint to doing so.
Our first note: This is really a two-person job. It’s really, really difficult to do this by yourself, because the forecheck is designed to prevent you from easily breaking out, and it’s impossible to singehandedly create an advantage so large that you can ruin an entire forecheck unless you skate like Cale Makar, at which point it is no longer blowing up a forecheck *via the pass*. All of these clips start with a D-to-D pass. Switching the play from one side to another forces the forecheck to shift, which creates the advantage for the breakout team to exploit. The D-to-D pass enables the entire maneuvre. Ethan Bear and Slater Koekkoek are going to show us how.
Koekkoek starts with the puck going around the net. F1 is going to follow him, and F2 starts to move to the strong side. At this point, Slater reverses the puck back to Bear on the near side— this is the D-to-D pass. F2 immediately stops and curls back towards Ethan Bear, becoming the closest forechecking player to the puck. And so he becomes F1, effectively switching roles with his other teammate in the frame, who becomes F2. F2’s responsibility is to support F1 while filling the middle of the ice, taking away passing options while F1 forces the puck-carrier to make a decision quickly. But F1-turned-F2 is still recovering and isn’t yet in proper position. This is the advantage that something as simple as a D-to-D pass can create. The forecheck is forced to shift and hand off responsibilities, and during this adjustment period, passing lanes open up.
Ethan Bear is a terrific passer and he gets to deliver the final blow to the doomed Canucks forecheck. The middle of the ice is open because of this shifting period between F1 and F2. F3, supporting the two of them, is naturally going to be on the strong side of the ice— that’s where the puck is. So all Bear has to do is pick his head up, look for his winger who should be wiiiide open on the weak side boards, and make good on the pass. Easy as that— the Oilers just dissected the Canucks forecheck using nothing more than a common play between their two defencemen.
So, to recap, the blueprint:
The defenceman who initially has the puck draws F1 to him, then makes a D-to-D pass to his partner on the other side of the defensive zone.
The receiving defenceman lifts his head up and looks up through the middle of the ice to the weak side boards in the neutral zone. During this process, he reads F3 and ensures that he has shifted over to the strong side as you would expect him to.
The defenceman delivers a long, diagonal pass through the wide-open middle to his winger on the weak side boards.
Here’s Mackenzie Weegar of the Florida Panthers doing the same, this time in the playoffs against the eventual Cup-champion Lightning. F1 and F2 do not switch responsibilities for Tampa here, but F1 still has to recover after Florida’s defencemen switch the play and that seam through the middle of the defensive zone is still wide open. Also, notice that F3 does not fully shift to the strong side— he holds right in the centre instead. But the lane is still open, just a little less open than it was for Ethan Bear. It makes little sense for F3 to be lurking the weak side on these plays, because then the strong side winger will be wide open— the furthest you’ll see him remain is in the middle of the ice like F3 was here.