Understanding and Leveraging The Four Advantages In Ice Hockey
The Four Types of Advantages in Ice Hockey
Knowing when you have an advantage on the ice is important. Knowing how to create such an advantage is perhaps even more so. Here are four advantages to be aware of during gameplay:
Numerical Advantage
A numerical advantage means having more players than your opponent in a given area.
Examples:
2v1 out of the corner
3v2 up high in the OZ
3v1 rush opportunity
It’s one thing to stumble into a numerical advantage situation. But the best players seek to find and create numerical advantages, like Sidney Crosby & Jake Guentzel.
Positional Advantage
A positional advantage is being in a more valuable/better position than your opponent.
Examples:
Inside positioning at the net
Being on the defensive side of your opponent
Patrice Bergeron has made a Hall of Fame career out of being positionally sound and compounding his positional superiority. He’s always in a position to support his teammates or easily pressure an opponent.
Quality Advantage
The quality advantage is simply having better talent than your opponent.
Examples:
Superior skating.
More fluent puckhandling.
Understanding speed differentials.
Having superior mental processing speed.
The poor player constantly goes 1v1 despite the odds. The elite player understands when their opponent is weak or in a compromised state that stacks the deck to their advantage (late in the shift, forward playing defense, flat-footed, etc.) and aggressively attacks.
Beat that compromised player 1v1, then play the resulting advantage to the net.
Physical Advantage
A physical advantage is having better physical tools than your opponent.
Examples:
Being stronger
Being faster (Or creating a speed differential)
Being fresher (E.g. Undercutting the other team’s line changes)
This is why developing athlete hardware is important. This is also why short shifts are important and are a compounding competitive advantage.
Which type of advantage(s) are you developing?
Further Reading