Dumping The Puck In Is Trendy
In 2013, Eric Tulsky (now general manager of the Carolina Hurricanes) and colleagues wrote a landmark paper on the value of controlled zone entries. The paper found that on average, a carry-in results in 0.57 shots compared to 0.12 for a dump-in. Tulsky’s paper led to a wave of research on the value of carrying the puck in from numerous researchers in the field, with nearly all obtaining similar conclusions.
Despite all of the attention around carrying the puck in, Sportlogiq Director of Analytics and Insights Mike Kelly pointed out an interesting observation that nearly every team in the league is dumping the puck in more than last year.
Within this finding, Kelly pointed out that the Wings are actually one of the few teams dumping the puck in *less*, which I think would surprise most Wings’ fans based on the online commentary I’ve seen.
Given this, I reached out to co-founder of Stathletes, Meghan Chayka to request data on dump-in percentage and recovered dump-in percentage from last season and this season to visualize this further.
Not only is Detroit one of the few teams dumping the puck in less than last season - they are doing so by the largest margin in the league! Importantly, not all dump-ins are created equal and when we think about effective forechecks, it’s smartly dumping the puck in to a specific location to optimize your chance of retrieval. Perhaps the problem isn’t so much the rate at which Detroit dumps the puck in, rather it’s the inability to recover those dump-ins.
Looking at last season (lefthand graph), we see that Florida lead the league in dump-in percentage, dumping the puck in more than 56% of the time. More important, Florida was also one of the best teams at recovering the puck, recovering their dump-ins almost 29% of the time. Florida and Carolina are two teams that have a reputation as “hard forechecking” teams and this graphic showcases their ability to recover their dump-ins. On the other hand, Detroit was one of the league leaders in dump-in% last season, however they recovered <24% of their dump-ins, good for 24th in the league. Last but not least, we see a moderately weak correlation between how often teams dump the puck in and how good they are at recovering the puck, suggesting that teams that intentionally play this style may be better at recovering the puck.
Fast forwarding to this season, we still see Florida leading the way dumping the puck in 60% of the time. Honing in on Detroit, we see that the Wings are dumping the puck in only 50% of the time (19th) and are recovering a woeful 22.29% (27th) of those dump-ins. This may be a big part of the reason why it feels like the Wings are always chasing the puck and struggling to sustain offensive rushes. Fixing this also isn’t as simple as saying “forecheck better” as there are a number of elements that contribute to a successful dump-in such as speed through the neutral zone, location of dump-in, speed of dump-in, and timing with the F1 and F2 forecheckers. I won’t begin to tackle fixing that and will leave that to the NHL experts but it’s a starting point for how the Wings can turn around their season with a better forechecking process.
The recent Wings had a lot of give-up shifts, where they spend 60 seconds stuck in their zone before dumping the puck at center ice and going for a change. This year, that seems to be a little better, which would account for fewer dump-ins without requiring a change of style.
However, if that's true, they should be better at recovering dump-ins, since more of them are attempts to maintain possession.
I'm not surprised dump-ins are on the rise - it seems like 2024 hockey has settled on "if you are in any doubt, rim it hard behind the net" as the best strategy.
A big factor in the Wings low recovery rate on dump ins, I think, is the amount of extended shifts in their own end. Once they finally clear the zone they need a complete change, so there is no one to try to retrieve the puck.