breakaway help

[shawbro 0]

Lets hope he's not an MSHer!!

I was thinking that when I posted it. What are the chances? Haha.

[hockeyfreak7 0]

I cant stress it enough, start making your move before you get to the hash.

If you wait any longer, you end up too close to the goalie. There is a sweet spot right before you hit the hash and you'll have enough time to make your move, but enough space to get the puck where you want it to go.

Watch all the NHL's highlight shootout goals. They all start their move before the hash mark. Get into this habit, and as long as you have decent hands, you should not run out of room.

[sickwilly 37]

If you're going to deke, I agree with those who suggest starting your move out by the hash marks (or a little more).

I've had the most luck shooting. I've found that it helps to keep stickhandling and fire it quickly, so the goalie has less of an idea of when the shot's coming/where it's going.

[fatwabbit 93]

Have changed my breakaway somewhat these days. Not only doing the move earlier to pull the goalie out of position, but making sure I get the shot off. Scored a couple of times on the breakaway/penalty shot when i just let a good snap shot go just inside the post.

[markstmartin89 0]

Keep the puck on the side of you, because then you can move the puck and deke or shoot a quick release

[DolomaticDangles 13]

I usually come in to about the hashmarks and rip a wrister glove side, that usually works. But if its a big goalie, Ill come in, fake a wrister, bring the puck to the middle, then go forehand to backhand. Or if I dont have time, Ill just go forehand to backhand and roof it

[starsfan71 9]

Bad Quality but this works 95 percent of the time for me if you have the hands for it.

[bdh13 1]

I'll add another + for shoot the puck. Making moves on a goaltender is much different than making them around a defenseman. It's pretty easy for a goaltender to flop on the puck or get lucky if you spend too much time shifting the puck.

[Law Goalie 147]

The reason why Ganger's move was so successful that year is that he incorporated real-threat shot-fakes into his moves. There are about five points where he could have shot the puck, every one of them highly dangerous, every one of them a plausible release-point based on his balance and where the puck was. What goalies figured out is that Ganger wasn't going to shoot the puck at any of those points, and he was looking for the forehand lay-up, so they just started waiting him out.

Just moving the puck around quickly will only work against intermediate to moderately skilled goalies: a newbie goalie simply won't follow the puck because he can't, and a good goalie will correctly read the puck's movement as non-threatening, with no chance of a shot, and just wait until you stickhandle yourself into a corner. That is, I think, what bdh13 was getting at.

And just FYI, shooting glove-side is a way lower-percentage shot against elite competition than 14"-blocker - unless, of course, you know or anticipate that the goalie is sitting on that shot, in which case, by all means, throw a little fake there and fire it over his glove or elbow as it drops.

The hardest drill I ever run on my kid goalies is just shooting into the five-hole about an inch above the stick, from about six feet away. Until they develop hard knee-drive, they can't stop even a soft shot placed there, even when they know ahead of time that's the only place I'll be shooting. Once they can do that reliably, I start bringing fakes in: if they butterfly without a released shot, point for me.

[Jarick 5]

I was hoping law would chime in and give away goalie secrets!

[LkptTiger 1]

I've never understood the need to over-think the breakaway/shootout move. At least for me, it's fairly simple: "Do you see a hole?" If the answer is "yes", snap your wrists and get it there in a hurry. If the answer is "no", well, then you're gonna have to make yourself a hole somehow - this is when it gets slightly more complicated and varies pretty widely; depending on your speed, goalie positioning, how he is matching your speed, his feet movement as well as any personal experiences/knowledge you might have as to his strengths and tendencies.

If your brain is anything like mine, it kind of just shuts you out of your own head and just takes over. The best way I can find to describe it is this: My subconscious drives while my conscious is asleep in the back seat. When I'm playing well, my brain stays like that for entire games. It's wild how your brain can go through SO much information in a crazy-short amount of time if you just allow it to push you out of your own way.

It's very, very, VERY rare that I'll find myself on a breakaway and have a pre-determined "go to" move.

I even try to keep my mind pretty clear in my shootout attempts. Again, any experience/intel that I have on each individual goalie comes into play a bit - but even then I only really consider a goalie's strengths and only use that information to tentatively "cross-out" options accordingly. I don't decide on any particular move at center-ice...I don't even decide whether I'm going to shoot or make a move. Sometimes I swing way to the left, sometimes I swing way to the right, sometimes I go right down the middle...sometimes I come in hot and sometimes I crawl, but there really is no method to my madness - for the most part, I just do what I feel like doing when the whistle blows. Once the puck is on my stick, my brain switches to "semi-conscious" mode and just starts looking for options really, really, really fast, until it finds something - either a small hole or a way to get the goalie to give one up for me.

It's been my experience that goal scoring is simply just something you were either born with or you weren't - it's not really something that can be taught or learned over time. I know/play with/have played with a lot of really good hockey players who struggle to find the goal column - and a lot of other guys who it seems could probably find a way to hit the back of the net from their own goal line if they want to.

[Law Goalie 147]

Great post.

The one point that might be open to inquiry is whether or not goal-scoring can be taught. It's been my limited experience that certain kinds of goal-scoring do appear to be teachable. It's come up once or twice before, but one of the neat side-effects of running little ad hoc goalie clinics is that the kids who volunteer as shooters become more proficient goal-scorers - and at roughly the same statistical rate as the goalies they're shooting on improve their own results.

The reasoning is, in my mind, pretty simple. Most goals are scored within about ten feet of the net, usually as a result of small-area plays, rebounds, broken plays, or other sudden changes or intensifications in the attack. The idea of the goalie drills is to put them in simulations of those high-percentage plays; the side-effect is putting the shooters in them on the flip-side.

Like Lktp said, a goal-scoring chance is a bit like high-speed chess: as the situation unfolds, sets of options shrink, others grow, until it narrows down to a final exchange (ie. the shot) which is likely favourable to one party or the other. Unlike chess, the terms of the initial engagement are not fixed. Even something as simple as the shooting-hand of the player(s) and the goalie can skew the odds hugely. Like chess, you can get better both through study (watching video, primarily, for hockey) and running through focussed simulations, then expanding on both in while games.

There was one really neat example I remember from late last year. It was a dead simple drill: puck-carrier attacks the net from just below the goal-line with a backdoor pass available. I gave the shooters their initial options - jam on the short-side or make a flat pass inside stick-length - and let it run. By the time the goalies had learned to lock down the short-side post and still be able to get their sticks on the pass, the shooters had more or less figured out that their next evolution were to open up to a saucer pass to the backdoor guy, or a wrap-around to the far post. This forced the goalies to get their gloves involved to pick off the saucer, and learn when/how to disengage from the post if the aerial pass or the wrap goes across. These little upgrades kept going until the shooters were running complex plays like faking the wrap, cutting across the goalmouth while shielding the puck with their legs from the goalie's stick, then using their bodies to screen as they slipped the puck out just enough - a couple of feet - to the second shooter to change the aerial angle to beat the goalie - and the goalie would track it the whole way, forcing at least a perfect shot to score, if not picking that off through intelligent anticipation. Tons of little skills and big abilities involved in making that unfold.

Now, of course, all but the most disciplined shooters start getting silly when it's a breakaway game. It becomes more about showing off than scoring, and by comparison, there's a lot more aimless skating involved, so the frequency and intensity of repetition drop considerably. (This is also why nobody improves anything when drop-in hockey degenerates into endless consecutive breakaways on a bored and exhausted goalie.) But kids like to show off, so we still do it -- it just means that breakaways aren't really open to the same kinds of improvement.

It's also true that the kinds of simulations or small-area games I'm talking about are only one part of goal-scoring. I can't teach a kid how to move through the neutral zone to open up the rush, or how to perfect his shooting mechanics to the point where he can deceptively release an 85+mph shot with perfect accuracy in any state of balance, or 95+ with good balance. Those things aren't open for counter-instruction in a goal clinic. What can be learned is how a goalie will think and move when time and space are limited in a set of common scoring plays, with equal access of the goalie to the shooter's moves and thoughts.