Poor puck handling

[JP51]

On 12/21/2024 at 8:52 PM, SDS said:

One of the things that grates on me the most when I watch the games is the apparent substandard puck handling. It’s such a basic skill yet this team was to be built on speed and skill.

Shift after shift I say out loud while I’m watching the game: lost the puck, muffed the pass, passed into skates, passed into stick, muffed receiving a pass,… I don’t have any stats for this and I don’t know how it compares league wide, but I compared to the teams were playing and it is just so bad.

Chris Baker is trying to polish Dylan Cozens during the second intermission of the Bruins game and while showing Dylan wheel around the boards, he just loses the puck and the Bruins take control. Just ***** lost it.

How many times has Thompson had the puck on the stick while he’s circling around in the puck just rolls off into the distance? How many times does Power just fire the puck into the skates of the other team?

Dahlin is the only elite puck handler we have. I don’t even know who I would put in second place. They all seem to be substantially below average from what I can tell when watching the teams we play.

It’s such a basic skill that is necessary at the NHL level, I’m not even sure how much anything else matters.

Am I off base here?

You are not... if you are old enough to remember Rick Martin (who was my favorite) awesome trigger man... terrible puck handler... he had Perrault and Robert to do that.... we seem to have alot of Martins... Tage, JJP, Cozens.even Quinn, Tuch is better down low and in traffic but is not especially good on the puck...  I think this issue is compounded by our percentage of losing faceoffs and having to chase to get the puck and losing battles in the corner..  Making each actual possession much more important.....  our unforced turnovers absolutely kill us... 

Edited Monday at 04:53 PM by JP51

[matter2003]

They also do a terrible job of passing the puck to players so that they can actually do something with it once they get it...too often it's to the wrong side or a little behind them or in their skates, so instead of actually being able to do something with it quickly, it takes them a second or two to gather the puck properly and by the time they do that, the defender is on top of them.

[SDS]

9 hours ago, matter2003 said:

They also do a terrible job of passing the puck to players so that they can actually do something with it once they get it...too often it's to the wrong side or a little behind them or in their skates, so instead of actually being able to do something with it quickly, it takes them a second or two to gather the puck properly and by the time they do that, the defender is on top of them.

That’s pretty much exactly what I said.