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Penalty Killing In Youth Hockey

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How coaches undertake penalty killing in youth hockey varies upon the age, skill level, and number of players on a team. I outlined the basic concepts in Chapter 11 but felt coaches of older teams or teams with more advanced personnel would require a more in depth discussion. In particular, if you wish to use all the skaters on a team with three forward lines and six defensemen – the roster regularly seen in minor hockey – you will use combinations entirely different from a team with four forward lines. This appendix shows the thought process to follow and a chart you can easily copy to set your rotations if you have three lines. Use this information in conjunction with the text in Chapter 11. The intent is not to change the basic principles …show more content…

At thirty-five seconds each, three sets of penalty killing forwards will run off a minute and forty-five seconds of a two minute penalty. Using those three pairs, all the forwards from the two lines that did not take the penalty will have skated. The six defensemen rotate normally and all six will have skated one shift of penalty killing to reach one minute and forty-five seconds. This format not only keeps fresh people skating, but in addition, this allows the penalized player to return to his regular line once the penalty time expires.
● Ideally, no matter the number of forward lines your team has, the man in the box should return to his own forward line or his defense pairing once the penalty time expires. We must give the opposition its full time on the penalty but we do not want to give them one second longer. Having a player skate cross-ice to the bench before another skater can go in extends their advantage for additional seconds. In addition, if a player comes out of the box to a line or partner he does not normally play with, there may be equal numbers on the ice but the team is certainly not back to full capacity. There may be two right-wingers or some combination not correct for the team. This extends the opposing team advantage by giving them a quasi-power …show more content…

It is possible to set up a full rotation using five defensemen, but I believe defensemen play stronger when with their normal partner. This means I will ignore the player who is the partner of the man in the box and play one of the defensive pairs twice during the penalty. As an example, if we label the defense pairs as A, B and C, and assuming a defenseman from A takes a penalty, I would play B, then C and come back with B. At thirty-five seconds for each shift, one minute and forty-five seconds will have expired in the penalty. On the fourth rotation, I would follow the suggestion in the earlier bullet point and pair the defenseman from A with a forward, awaiting the other A defenseman when the penalty

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