Why 'Practice Players' Exist and How to Avoid Developing Them
Why do players fail to transfer from practices to games?
This is part of a three-part season-starting series:
Part 1: Why 'Practice Players' Exist and How to Avoid Developing Them
Part 2: Why Flow Drills Suck & Why Coaches Should Throw Away Their Cones and On-Ice Objects
It is safe to say that we all know a player that is amazing in practice, but as soon as the game starts, they are average (at best). These are known colloquially as “practice players.”
A ‘practice player’ is a player that is fantastic in a practice setting, but fails to maintain that level of performance within games.
Why do these players exist?
Rote “Skills” Development
Rote = mechanical or habitual repetition of something to be learned.
Effectively rote practice develops a technique in isolation. An example of this is a baseball player hitting off a tee. While this may help improve some hitting mechanics, this, in isolation, does not make a hitter great.
The ice hockey equivalent to this is a drill that practices a habitual repetition of a movement pattern. This is part of my grief with “the pretzel” in warmups.
What is missing from these drills is the information and perception provided by pressure and opponents. This information is critical in choosing if and when to use a technique/technical ability (a.k.a. “movement solution”).
Perception: The Game Process
Within a game, players go through a “SADE” process. This is the idea around perceiving and then acting:
Search - Scanning
Analyze - Risk/Reward
Decide - Thought of the solution
Execute - Physical manifestation of solution
With rote-type activities in practice, there is a strengthening of technical execution, but a major deficiency in the searching, analysis, and deciding steps… arguably the more important aspects. Practice players look masterful within drills that lack the perception necessary to transfer well into a game environment.
Coupling Perception with Action: Developing Game Players
To develop ‘game players’ (a.k.a “gamers”), perception must be the critical component. Players should be inserted into situations where they answer the following questions:
The Read: Should I execute this movement?
The Timing: When should I deploy this movement?
Beginners who lack any technical skills can benefit a lot from basic foundational activities and drills. Once the basics are covered (not mastered), a player should advance into environments full of perception/action and ultimately the SADE process.
Many modern coaches are turning away from putting objects (cones, etc.) on the ice as they lack players going through the SADE process. These coaches instead prefer using a player rather than a cone due to their understanding that real talent goes beyond technique competency.
Coaches and players ultimately want to develop the reads and the timing required to play the game. Thus, coupling a player’s perception and actions is a requirement.
Case Study: Stanislav Svozil
A favorite of this is comes from Columbus Blue Jackets defense prospect Stanislav Svozil. In development camp, he was what some would call “unskilled” and fumbled his way through “skill drills.” Yet, once the games started, he was a star! He was making the reads, had great decisions, and executed well enough to be the most dominant player on the ice. It’s not a coincidence that his game took off playing alongside Connor Bedard. He understands patterns and where to insert himself inside a game setting.
Funny enough, the World Junior Championship following his first NHL training camp, he was a standout top performer! He led Czechia to their best performance ever, a top seed in the round-robin and ultimately a Silver Medal.
If you watch his first NHL assist, you can see that he is loose with his puckhandling. But as you now understand, having perfect technical ability is not a requirement for top game performance.
Next time, we are going to dive more in-depth into this topic to talk about the difference between knowledge of the game vs knowledge in the game and show why flow drills are terrible for player development.
Read Part #2 here:
Further Reading