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.