Cole Caufield: Hand Skill & Pure Finesse
With Cole Caufield on his goal last night, it was an excellent display of pure hand skill, finesse, hip pocket usage, and how he widened his stance in his lower body to create space and maneuver around Macklin Celebrini effectively. Caufield’s skating and puck skills in tight have continued to show more flair in his NHL tenure thus far, where he’s been able to maintain positioning on his toes to stay more agile consistently.
Two things that Caufield has continued to get better at from 2019 and on from his NTDP U18 tenure to where he is at now:
Caufield really leverages his footwork now to maneuver at top speed, leverage cutbacks in the O Zone, create space on his edges, and leveraging his wider lower body posture in his feet to create deception. Caufield has added layers to his power skating that have helped him become a more dynamic attacker at the NHL level, and same with his puck skills. His pass-first game has continued to improve over time,
With Caufield, he’s also gotten better with his handling skill under pressure, which allows him to not only be more agile, it helps him create space at higher tempos of speed with his skating.
As for how this relates back to his OT winner, two main factors that drove his skill on this goal were his skating and his puck skill. He leveraged his skating for a more dynamic posture element, and then his puck skills to get out of pressure, leverage his hip pocket, and handle the puck from his range more often.
This was far from an effortless goal, but with how freely Caufield moved and how quickly he linked his skating and puck skill together, he gave it the illusion of being effortless. It was awesome to see how Caufield managed to maneuver in this situation, attack the entry on a diagonal to get the D moving (and strong side F Macklin Celebrini in the eventual 1v1), and get around a flat-footed Celebrini.
Caufield does a great job of attacking that entry, getting away from Jake Walman, and instead choosing to attack Macklin Celebrini as the “defender” here. Celebrini reaches out with his stick, and Caufield already has the puck behind his back foot heel here, allowing him to keep the puck away from Celebrini and then pull the puck through his legs.
Caufield does so, drives around Celebrini with a strong bottom hand on his stick and his front foot planted in front of his body, and then Caufield goes short side shelf for the game winner.