UConn looking to the past to try to spark offense

After UConn men’s hockey was shutout for the third time this season in a loss to Boston College on Saturday, the coaching staff continued to search for ways to fix the offense. Since the team had either matched or increased its goals per game output from the previous season across each of the last four years, they decided to look backwards. Instead of focusing on what’s going wrong now, they wanted to see what they were doing right in the past.

“We went back over the past couple of years and looked at all the goals we've scored,” head coach Mike Cavanaugh explained. “You start seeing tendencies… you just pick up on it and realize we're not doing this as well as we should be doing it.”

Two things stood out from the tape: UConn’s spacing has been bad and it’s not scoring enough off the rush.

With spacing, the coaches noticed the team has a habit of bunching together in certain areas of the ice. For example, while the staff may preach creating traffic in front of net to take away the goaltender’s vision and create opportunities for tip-ins or rebounds, they’ve sometimes had too much traffic in the lane.

“You don't necessarily want to have three guys in front of the net because now you got six guys because they have three guys covering your three,” Cavanaugh said. “It's harder to get the puck down sometimes when you have three guys in front of the net.”

The lack of spacing has also caused issues in transition.

“I think we can be better off the rush,” Cavanaugh said. “You're trying to cover three lanes. Like, you don't want to have two guys on the right wing because you're not covering enough ice.”

The coach often mentions the three ways to score —the power play, off the rush and offensive zone play. The latter hasn’t been much of an issue for the Huskies since they ranked seventh in the nation in Corsi, which essentially measures time of possession. But their power play has been inconsistent (at best) at 14.0 percent which ranks 52nd out of 64 teams, while they haven’t gotten enough off the rush.

So how does the spacing get fixed? It’s apparently as simple as highlighting it during a film session.

“A picture's worth 1000 words,” Cavanaugh said. “They see it and they say, ‘Oh yeah, maybe I should be off the back post [because] we already have a guy in front of the net.”

Whether it’s spacing, a lack of goals from the power play and off the rush or something else, UConn needs to figure out how to put the puck in the back of the net with more frequency. Its 6.7 shooting percentage is third-worst in the country while 2.4 goals per game output is 47th nationally.

The Huskies have more to clean up than just goals — namely bad mistakes at bad moments — but if they can score with consistency, that’ll cover up a lot of the other issues.