How UConn transformed its lackluster power play unit into a juggernaut

Throughout UConn’s Hockey East tenure, its power play has been a perpetual weak spot. Over its first 10 seasons in the league, the unit averaged a 16.0 percent conversion rate with a mean national ranking of 41.4. The Huskies only cracked the top 20 one time and scored at a 20+ percent clip on one other occasion.

Even with that, the 2023-24 season represented a low point. UConn’s power play sat 59 out of 64 in Division I at 13.7 percent. That ranking was the program’s worst mark in the Hockey East Era while the conversion rate was fourth-worst.

Alongside the bevy of off-ice problems that afflicted the Huskies that campaign, head coach Mike Cavanaugh identified the toothless power play as a main culprit of the team’s shortcomings.

“It's an area that is going to be a focal point over the summer: How can we get better on the power play?” he said in April 2024. “It's not just recruiting good players. We've got to do a better job coaching it and that's an area that I'm going to spend a lot of time on this summer.”

The build

Cavanaugh handed the project to his top deputy, associate head coach Tyler Helton. Although Helton had already been in charge of the power play the year prior, he juggled penalty kill duties simultaneously. That proved to be too much for a single person, so Cavanaugh took the latter off Helton’s plate.

“Just doing one special team helped me,” Helton explained. “Doing both was a lot. I felt really good about where the penalty kill was because they knew what the heck they were doing. I didn't have to worry about them a whole lot. Getting just the power play this year was important because I could just focus on the power play. I wasn't trying to put two special teams together on top of the pre-scout.”

As a former defenseman who had spent much of his coaching career working with the blue liners, Helton wasn’t a prototypical power play specialist but his experience working with the penalty kill proved useful. UConn had routinely featured one of the top units in the nation, finishing top-15 nationally in each of the previous three years. In 2022-23, the Huskies’ PK didn’t allow a goal until their seventh game of the season.

As Helton started his rebuild of the power play, he first looked at it from the perspective of a penalty killer.

“I thought about what was difficult for us to defend on the penalty kill,” he said.

A common theme emerged: Player movement. Most power plays stick to a similar philosophy: Line up in a static formation — 1-3-1, umbrella, overload, spread — and try to open up gaps in the defense with quick passing and puck movement. But when opponents moved both the puck and the players, it could be hard to keep track of defensive assignments.

“I always thought that [motion] was difficult when I would pre-scout power plays,” Helton said. “If teams have moved a lot, I was like, ‘What the hell's going on?’ And it would confuse our penalty kill at times, too.”

At the same time, he dug into the tape from the previous season to figure out why the Huskies’ power play struggled so much. He spotted a clear problem: They didn’t put enough stress on the penalty kill.

“We were stagnant the year before. One guy stands in one spot, he sits there and waits for a one timer like [Alexander] Ovechkin,” he said. “I thought that was easy to defend.”

Those two discoveries ultimately led to the same conclusion: UConn’s power play needed more movement. So Helton set designing a new system rooted in that concept by pulling ideas from unlikely places.

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