Blashill vs. Babcock: High-Event Hockey vs. Low-Event Hockey

In my last post, I talked about how I’d be looking at a difference between the coaching styles of Mike Babcock and Jeff Blashill. As someone who has viewed most Wings games that Babcock has coached and probably over a hundred games that Blashill has coached one difference has always been noticeable to my eyes: That Babcock coaches low-event hockey while Blashill coaches high-event hockey.

By events, I mean shots on goal and scoring chances. It’s important to note that the goal of both styles is to outscore the opponent; which happens by having more shots, scoring chances, and puck possession than the opponent. It’s also important to note that depending on the in-game situation (i.e. defending a lead, being down two goals) the strategy may change.

Overall, Blashill to me has always coached a more high event game.


So I wanted to see if this was true. Unfortunately, there aren’t too many AHL stats tracked. Figuring out possession numbers for AHL teams is as far as I know impossible for the general public. The best that I was able to do was to look at individual game logs for the Grand Rapids Griffins during the 2014/2015 regular season. Here are some of my findings:




During the regular season last year, the Grand Rapids Griffins averaged:


31.9 Shots For
29.5 Shots Against
61.4 Shots For and Against per game
A 2.4 Shot Differential

Meanwhile, the Detroit Red Wings averaged:


29.6 Shots For
28.3 Shots Against
57.9 Shots For and Against per game
A 1.3 Shot Differential

So at a quick glance, it's easy to see that last year at least Blashill's team did seemingly generate more events than the Detroit Red Wings. It would be nice if the AHL tracked missed and blocked shots so we could look at those numbers, but that is not the case. 

Even more interesting to me, is that the Griffins managed to do this while having a better shot differential than the Detroit Red Wings. This admittedly doesn't factor in the different playing styles between the AHL and NHL, but I wouldn't expect the shots generated to be that different.

Using the data from SportingCharts, we can easily compare what the Griffins did in term of shots to every NHL team last season. 

Only six NHL teams last year averaged more shots in their games (CHI, OTT, TOR, ARI, CBJ, NYI) than the Grand Rapids Griffins. Meanwhile among NHL teams last year, the Detroit Red Wings ranked 26th in this category. 

Also, only seven NHL teams had a better shot differential than what Grand Rapids generated last year (NYI, LAK, CHI, STL, NSH, CAR, MIN). 

Admittedly, a lot of this has to be taken with several grains of salt as I'm directly comparing AHL shot averages to NHL shot averages without putting in the time to see how the two correlate. I do think though that this look suggests that Blashill does seem to coach a successful high-event game, which confirms what I have seen myself. 

It'll be interesting to see how these numbers look for Detroit this season. 

If anyone wants to look at the spreadsheet that I used to gather this data, you can access it here.

Blashill vs. Babcock: A Preview

The Detroit Red Wings officially got their training camp for the 2015/2016 season underway on Friday, September 18th in Traverse City. Despite bringing in free agents Mike Green and Brad Richards over the summer, the biggest change for the team was losing head coach Mike Babcock and replacing him with Jeff Blashill.

Babcock was the head coach of the Red Wings for a ten years, an eternity in the NHL, and enjoyed a lot of success. He never missed the playoffs, won a Stanley Cup, and got to a game 7 in a second Stanley Cup Final. Before coaching the Red Wings he took an undermanned Mighty Ducks of Anaheim team to the Stanley Cup Final and while coaching the Wings he won two gold medals coaching Team Canada at the Olympics (which doesn't seem like an accomplishment until you realize the drought Team Canada had in that tournament before). In the past couple of years especially he was able to turn a less than stellar defensive group in to one of the top shot suppressing teams in the league. Mike Babcock is regarded as one of the best coaches in the league, and very well should be.

All of that being said, I was ecstatic to see him leave and to see the Wings name Jeff Blashill head coach.

I've had the luxury of being able to watch a lot of games that Jeff Blashill has coached, either live or through a stream. Blashill is in many ways a disciple of Mike Babcock, in fact it was Babcock who called him out of the blue when Blashill was coaching Western Michigan University and asked Blashill to join Detroit as an assistant coach. The next year, he was offered the head coaching job in Grand Rapids and took it, wanting to stay until he found out whether Babcock would be staying or leaving.

So, it comes as no surprise that people have pointed out many of the similarities between Babcock and Blashill. It helps that they sound very much alike and use a lot of the same hockey lingo.

But I'm more interested in what separates the two coaches, apart from the well-known fact that Blashill is a player's coach who believes in open communication while Babcock was more old-fashioned in his relationships toward the players.

Due to this, I spent a serious chunk of time gathering the shots for and shots against data for the 2014/2015 Grand Rapids Griffins. Finding stats in the AHL is hard, so the best way I found to gather the data was to pull it from the individual game logs. My next post will detail that.