Evaluating Dylan Holloway's 2 Goals: Game 4
Dylan Holloway has the game breaking talent to provide when necessary, not consistently (quite yet), but brings that innate speed and natural instinct driven offensive zone hockey sense that really stood out in Game 4. Holloway was really impressive to watch without the puck and how he was able to use the perimeter as positional leverage, understanding how to get off the wall with timing and inside his check when necessary, but also lurking outside the dots to be an off-puck support option near the walls.
Holloway was also a noticeable rush threat all throughout this game, again being able to provide depth in the rush by being a secondary triangle option (so not an imminent threat), but using his speed and depth to his stride to attack with pace up ice and be involved in the play. Clearly, what stands out the most when initially watching Holloway is the game breaking speed element he brings that allows him to be a threat in every direction. When you watch him, he brings innate cutbacks, turns, tight pivots under tight radius, maneuvering side-to-side, sidesteps, playing on his toes, and brings a lot of innate explosiveness coming through and off his outside edges. He brings depth and pace to his linear crossovers, which allows him to move really well in a straight-line while still being able to be an agile threat moving laterally with those crossovers as well.
Holloway hasn't consistently shown it yet, but linking together his hands and his pace under contact will come with more reps and added adjustment to an NHL top-six role over time. Again, he still needs some time, but the fact that he has game breaking elements in his game and shows them inconsistently, that is still a very good sign for what he could become in the future.
What's really noticeable about this is the initial timing on Holloway's swing through in middle ice on the breakout situation here. He swings in and away, which opens up middle ice directly for Edmonton here, but also allows Holloway to be open as a diagonal passing option from the D-to-D pass. The change of sides possession through Edmonton's D allowed Holloway to be open and disrupts Florida's NZ forecheck right away in the sequence here. A bank pass off the boards opens up Leon Draisaitl on entry coming down the flank, and now Holloway had multiple full strides worth of open ice to create speed and heaviness in pursuit of the puck here.
That heaviness allowed Holloway to get behind Florida's defenders so effortlessly here, since he was able to leverage the speed and handling this puck under pressure in a very hard to maneuver scenario. This was a result of multiple factors in Holloway's ability to shift the puck to his backhand:
Holloway did a really excellent job of understanding how to escape this situation and understand how to get behind Florida's defenders using a variety of tactical adjustments within the scenario. This gave him more depth to his puck-handling, and it started with that first adjustment of him separating the upper and lower body to adjust his hands accordingly. The puck positioning and puck placement element allowed him to keep this puck fluidly in motion, without the puck bobbling, and without the puck getting away from him easily here.
As mentioned above, to ACTUALLY first utilize the puck placement and leverage puck positioning in itself is challenging, but to do that while in the midst of acceleration speed is much more difficult and more advanced. This is why I believe there's still more from Holloway to give in the future. Even though he probably isn't where he wants to be in his development now, if we're seeing flashes of skill like this, he still has a lot of potential to be impactful as a top-six future forward. Not many forwards are able to do little skills like the one Holloway showed on that first goal of the game there.
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We'll start the second here at 0:28 to give a full understanding of what Holloway was able to do leading up to the goal here. On the breakout setting, he does an excellent job of using a change of sides possession to Corey Perry in weak side ice to stretch out the line rush setting and stretch Florida's D moving laterally as well. Now, the ironic thing here is that Holloway becomes the biggest threat off the rush, even though he isn't directly involved in the play. Holloway is able to do this because of multiple reasons:
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