by Mike Vandenberghe
During games we use SPA to look at where we are getting chances on our opponent. We can see where we are shooting from, where the shots landed on the net and where we missed from. I am going to walk you through a real game using pictures exported from SPA Pro to show how useful in-game and post-game analysis is with SPA. When looking at the shot pictures, remember that the first number beside a shot location on the ice is the player number, and the second number is the shot number. Blue shot markers are saved shots, red are goals, black are missed shots and green are shots that were blocked by the opposing team (offensive blocked shot).
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I can see that we are getting all our shots from the right side and need to open up our play on the left side. This picture also shows that we are getting traffic at the net.
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I can show our players that in the second period we got more shots from the left side. But we had too many offensive blocked shots when our defencemen were shooting.
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This shows us that we did a better job of not having offensive blocked shots and that we did a very good job of net presence scoring two goals in a tough area.
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This picture shows where we have drawn up a play up the whiteboard tool. Here is a last minute situation face off for us to hopefully score. I can store this picture for future reference, or to use during a drill.
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This picture let's me see where we scored our goals from and where they went on the net, again for future patterns on that goalie and also to reaffirm that by going to prime scoring areas we scored 4 out of 5 goals.
Game summary on shots - I now can use this information in the future. I have a record of the goalie we played, where we scored from and where we had our good chances from. I can also conclude that we did not shoot high on the goaltender and had a lot of outside shots from our prime scoring area. I can then add this to my practice plans for upcoming practices and do drills that will benefit the players and help them get better scoring chances in the future.
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This is a picture of the hits that were tracked for one period. It shows me that we didn't have a lot of pressure on our forecheck with 3 OZ hits, but it does say #19 had a good period with puck pursuit. We also did have good backpressure in the NZ hopefully turning pucks over on the back checks.
You can see how easy it is to do both in-game and post-game analysis with SPA, which helps not only with game strategy, but assists you in desiging drills for your practices. If you have any questions about this article or SPA please feel free to contact us. To see how SPA tracks the statistics you've seen in this article please view our Online Demo.
