Hockey Shift Length: The Art of the Undercut
How long should an ice hockey shift be? How do hockey players know when to change lines? Why do hockey players take 40-second shifts?
How long should an ice hockey player take for their shift? When should ice hockey players change lines?
Recently my U16 team played against a team from Pittsburgh that thoroughly impressed me. What did they do? Undercut our shift length. All. Game. Long.
Their players would consistently change after 20 seconds. One player I observed even had a 13-second shift. That’s a massive competitive advantage.
Undercutting
Undercutting is a racing strategy that involves a car pitting a lap or a few laps earlier than the rival car in an attempt to gain a performance advantage from fresh tires.
With the fresh tires, the car can post faster lap times than their rival who is still on old, worn tires. Those faster laps then allow the car to pass their rival when their rival eventually pits.
How Long Should a Hockey Shift Be?
Let’s take a look at the below chart from Micah Blake McCurdy that shows shots-for and shots-against over time, based on shift start location. This chart gives us a great visual of how long a hockey shift should be.
What do we learn from this hockey shift length chart?
The first 15 seconds of a shift account for abnormally high shot rates.
From around 15 to 40 seconds there is an equal share of shots (for and against)
Beyond 40 seconds there is a massive performance degradation that quickly leads to ‘shots-against‘ increasing significantly while ‘shots-for’ decrease significantly.
Moral of the story & chart
When playing hockey, there is a massive competitive advantage by changing in 40 seconds and under
While this chart applies to NHL players, the same principle holds true for hockey at any age/level. Tired players = bad players.
The difference between good and great can sometimes be as simple as undercutting shift length.
Further reading - Taking a look at what tired legs and tired minds looks like
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