Screens & Deflections

From time to time I’ve noticed a lot of my new players not having a clue about screening and deflecting out in front of the goal. I couldn’t blame them, I guess, in that not a lot of attention is usually paid to this skill where they came from. (And, the more I travel around social media, the more I sense that not a lot of hockey coaches understand the principles involved in screening the goalie, or deflecting shots.)

One of my pet peeves is to see a youngster stand off to the side of the goal with his stick-blade held out in front of the rival goaltender. I mean, think along with me here… The goaler obviously has clear view of a distant shot if our forward is camped-out off to the side of the net. And, at levels beyond about Mites or Atoms, the goalie dares enough to come-out towards the shot to smother anything that’s deflected off a stick as I’ve just described. That said, here are a couple of important keys for more effectively screening the opposing goaltender, and possibly deflecting the puck past him or her…

• A forward should position with his/her butt towards the rival goaler. Stationed at mid-net and in front of the goalie, our forward has a chance to reach any shot that isn’t too far beyond either net-post.
• The forward should then point all three blades — both skates and the stick-blade — directly at the location of the puck. (Hey, we’ll take a goal if it nicks either of those three blades on the way through!) The forward often has to re-position (for example, as the puck is passed from one point to the other, again always pointing the three blades towards wherever the puck might be).
• With the stick-blade pointed directly in-line with the incoming shot, the forward only wants to nick the puck slightly with a side of the stick, thusly only redirecting its course very slightly. (A lot of young players will allow the puck to hit flat on their blade, which usually kills the force of the puck and prevents it from continuing on towards the goal.)

Now, after you see this brief video of some of my long ago junior high school kids working at these skills, I’ll have a few more comments…

You may have noticed that there were a few sample drills where we had only one forward working out in front of the net. That’s the way I initially designed the drill. However, what I discovered was that during such a set-up our goaltenders were coming far out and smothering the deflections. In a way, I think that’s a slightly unrealistic move for a goalie during real game action (there are usually other things going on that prevent him from coming out THAT far). At the same time, I didn’t want to just order my goaltenders to remain back in the net. So, what I ultimately did was to have the player who just completed the screen & deflect to go to a backdoor position, thereby at least keeping our goalies a little more honest.

By the way… I think scoring goals on screens and deflections is a matter of both skill and luck. At the same time, I believe the more a player practices and fine tunes these skills, the luckier he or she gets.