What Johnny G Teaches Us About Risk-Reward
In hockey or otherwise, room for improvement is often hiding in what is called conventional, accepted, or common wisdom. This is because whatever falls under this heading is taken for granted—not questioned. In today’s article, though, I’m going to question hockey’s automatic disregard for hanging, and I’d like to do so through the play of Johnny Gaudreau.
It's a dirty little insult to be called a "hanger" in the game of hockey, as it implies that you habitually leave your teammates out to dry in the defensive zone for a jump on offensive opportunities (and hence all the glory). Those who have played hockey understand the origin of this scorn; it really is quite annoying when one of your linemates is just chilling in the neutral zone, waiting for a breakaway pass. It's especially intolerable if they begin shouting or banging their stick. It sometimes reaches a point where you'd rather the other team score so that Coach will pull your teammate aside and tell him to play some f*** defense.
At the elite levels of the game, of course, nobody is doing this. Perhaps the closest we see to hanging is what Johnny Gaudreau does on a nightly basis.
Now, before we dive any further, allow me to express a few grievances on Johnny Hockey's behalf. This guy is a bona fide stud who gets zero respect. Outside of a few Calgary/Columbus homers, and pretty much all of the players, JG is routinely undervalued. (One of our very own writers, in fact, was part of this blind majority until recently. Looking at you, Alex.)
A few common reasons are cited for why J. Hockey shouldn’t be taken seriously. The first is that he hasn't succeeded in the playoffs. My response to that is simple—neither have so many top players in the game that it would be a chore to list them. I can give you one, though: Auston Matthews. That's right, last year's MVP has 457 points in 407 regular season games, yet only 33 points in 39 playoff games—and hasn't made it past the first round in 6 attempts. The bottom line is that the playoffs are a different animal, requiring a team effort plus some luck, and it shouldn’t sully a player’s reputation if he hasn’t broken through yet.
A second citation against Johnny Hockey is that his defensive game is suspect. In the clips below, however, I'll show why that isn't the case; and in a separate article I've been mulling over in my head, I plan to show that nobody really knows what they mean when they say "defensive hockey." Casual and serious fans alike know what generates offense; relatively few people know what generates defense. So, I don't buy the defensive liability argument, and certainly not from the people who tend to make it.
Thirdly, people will attribute Johnny’s success to his former linemates, Elias Lindholm and Matthew Tkachuk. While Lindholm and Tkachuk are undoubtedly great players, and the line together was a wonderful example of "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts," this argument is just plain stupid. I mean, you can look at basic stats like points and +/-, or advanced stats like WAR and GAR, and see that Johnny led his linemates in most metrics last season. If anything, he elevated them more than they elevated him.
Speaking of elevating, it’s important to note that none of these citations against JG mention his size, but at 5'9" and 165 lbs, he's one of the smallest players in the league. People don’t mention this because it would impolite—and politically incorrect—to do so, but this doesn’t mean it’s absent from their thinking. In my opinion, this bias ends up taking shelter under the three citations listed above. Playoffs are seen as the time of year where big bodies win out; defensive play is assumed to require more size than offensive play; and Lindholm and Tkachuk, in having the kind of bruising frames the establishment loves, were surely doing "the dirty work" while Gaudreau reaped the reward, right? Size, by the way, is another artifact of conventional wisdom.
The fourth and final citation is that Johnny is a hanger. This has nothing to do with his size, but is perhaps more insulting because it attacks his character, his style of play. People are willing to dismiss his offensive output on the assumption that just about anyone could produce the same if they completely ignored defense and were willing to abandon their teammates. Often, this train of thought will end up rerouting into praise for JG's linemates. But the thrust of this argument is completely wrong, and it’s time for me to show you why:
Reason #1: Johnny isn't hanging.
Remember, hanging involves leaving your teammates out to dry in the defensive zone. But what if, at the time the puck is turned over, Johnny is on the defensive side of the play? Then he wouldn't be hanging at all, would he?
At the beginning of the clip below, Johnny is in a perfect defensive position. By the end, he's scored on a breakaway:
Once again, Johnny is on the right side of his defender and isn't "cheating" in the slightest; he only takes off once Lindholm separates Rantanen from the puck:
Johnny is almost in his own CREASE when the video opens, and yes, you guessed it, the video ends in a Flames goal:
Here we have the sort of opportunity that a traditional hanger would salivate over: an empty net. But once again, Johnny remains responsible defensively until the very last moment, at which point he springs:
This one is particularly devastating for the haters, as Johnny basically drafts off Bouchard, slings past him at the last moment, freezes both defenders and the goalie, and then slips it to Tkachuk, who has the indecency to freeze Bouchard and Kostkinen AGAIN before sliding it home ALONG THE ICE—woof:
Reason #2: Even if Johnny is hanging, which he isn’t, not many players can convert offensive opportunities like him anyway. To the above clips, I’ll add the ones below. After watching them, can you tell me (honestly) that any old regular player could do this?
Even when I watch this pass in slow-motion, I don't understand how it gets across. And even though I had better vision from the camera angle than Johnny had on the ice, I still didn't see this look:
A little later in the same game, Gaudreau takes a beebee from Tkachuk, settles it with his skate, and summarily roofs it past the tender. Not many players could settle that down, let alone finish the job:
What else can you say about this one? Johnny creates, as the announcer says, "something from nothing":
For icing on the cake, here Johnny completely disregards the 2-0 code that says you have to pass it to your teammate, and uses him as a distraction to bury one:
Seriously, go ahead and try to find clips like this for more than a handful of top players. If you succeed, we'll welcome you to the team.
Reason #3: Is selective hanging even bad?
Finally, we come around to interrogating conventional wisdom head-on. Hockey lore says that hanging is bad—period. However, young players are also taught to never pass the puck up the middle in their own zone, yet if they watch NHL games, they’ll notice every team doing this every minute of every game. Why? Well, it turns out that there's a pretty big difference between doing something well and doing it poorly. A bad pass up the center of the ice is something to be avoided, while an accurate pass can neatly circumvent the forechecking pressure that usually concentrates along the boards. Coaches of young hockey players, mindful of the average skill level, must rely on a blanket policy of never passing it up the middle. They can also say: never hang. But at the elite levels of the game, we should open our minds to the concept that hanging can be done well. And the first step should be to change the terminology, because, again, Johnny G isn't hanging. Instead, he's “jumping.” As in “jumping the gun.”
Simply put, “jumping” is when a player tries to anticipate the transition from defense to offense, ultimately with the goal of being on the forefront of that transition. The risk here is that the player is wrong and the transition doesn’t occur, thus leaving his team “short-handed” in the sense that he is now out of position. What Johnny G’s been teaching us is that the risk is well worth the potential reward. Yes, it’s partly due to his insane offensive skills. Yes, it’s partly due to having good linemates. But much of it boils down to a willingness to take the risk and eschew that raggedly old wisdom of being “defensively sound.” Ultimately, if the goal of the game is to score more than your opponent, then any play which gives you a better chance of scoring than getting scored on, is good. This Johnny G embodies.
Let’s think about it theoretically for a moment. Even a player without Johnny’s offensive talent may want to take more risks than traditionally allowed for the following reasons. First, even if the odds of being out of position are equivalent to generating an odd-man rush, you still might want to take a chance because a 5-4 is much less potent than a breakaway, 2-1, or 3-2 on the other end. We can think of this as exchanging a higher-numbers odd-man rush for a lower-numbers one. Granted, there is some sequencing to think through—i.e., sometimes the opponent will have “first crack” at their odd man rush. But it’s possible that this sequencing bonus is made up for by the difference in attack potency the other way. Secondly, as we’ve noted, players at elite levels aren’t going to be doing doughnuts in the neutral zone until the puck happens to pop out. No, they’re going to be selective about their hanging; they’re going to jump. Done correctly, this would minimize the risk of leaving your team vulnerable. Finally, there is the old wisdom, too rarely applied, of the best defense is a good offense. I can personally attest that when people are aggressive and attacking, you naturally take a defensive stance. The most frequent result of someone jumping more than usual might end up being that the other team more easily gives up their offensive zone. And that wouldn’t be a bad thing at all.
All that is theoretical, of course. Jumping would not only need to become a skill that players intentionally think about and practice, but it would also be something that coaches and even management would have to condone. Until that happens, only people like Johnny G, who do it with such success, will be given leeway.
So let’s conclude with a few inside looks at how, exactly, Johnny does it. Most of it has to do with positional gambles. For example, watch in this clip how Johnny waits for the defender to make a mistake instead of forechecking him like a banshee, which is what 99% of players would do:
You can see that Severson rushes the play, possibly because he is expecting a more ferocious forecheck. Regardless, Johnny doesn’t do much here—it’s mostly in the hands of Tkachuk and Lindholm—but it’s a good example of what I mean by a “positional gamble.” He does the same thing in the following video, except this time it pays off: P.K. misses on the swipe and Johnny's "on the spot":
The above doesn’t result in a goal, but this is how Gaudreau generates opportunities. Also, what else do you want him to do? Back-check like mad (and bypass this potential offensive opportunity) for the relatively-unlikely scenario of being able to defend PK on a 5-4 rush the other way? It just doesn’t make any sense.
In our final example, Johnny almost intercepts the pass cleanly, but even when he doesn’t, he’s in a position to break the other way:
Again I would ask, where is he more valuable? In front of his own net, hoping to block a shot or tie up a stick? Or putting pressure on a guy high in the zone, with designs for an odd-man rush? I think at this point, the evidence has provided an answer.
Let’s wrap things up by taking down one more piece of conventional wisdom. As fans, we seem obsessed with individualizing performance. The instinct makes sense, but the application of it often makes us look stupid. Instead of asking whether Johnny was more important to his former linemates or the other way around—a debate we can have at some point—let’s appreciate what the line was able to do together. One can think of Johnny’s role on that line as high-risk, high-reward—as offering throughput to Lindholm and (especially) Tkachuk’s value. For instance, in this final clip, we can think of Gaudreau as offering a high multiplier on Tkachuk’s play along the board:
Without JG’s superb positioning, anticipatory skills, and willingness to jump, Tkachuk might have just chipped the puck deep. He wouldn’t have gotten an assist, Calgary wouldn’t have scored a goal, and I wouldn’t be able to rub it in your face that it wasn’t even Tkachuk in that clip—it was Backlund.
