Kirill Marchenko: Speed Through Crossover Acceleration
Kirill Marchenko has quickly turned into one of the league’s most dynamic players throughout the 2024-25 NHL season thus far. When you look at Marchenko’s game, in large part it is built on speed and powerful crossover usage through transition offense scenarios and offensive attack scenarios in general. When Marchenko gets going, his brute power and lower body strength makes him really hard to stop, almost like a train coming down the tracks.
When we talk about crossover usage, it’s not a rarity and secret that pretty much every NHLer uses crossovers as a way of gaining speed. However, I believe that when it comes to power and how he gains acceleration through crossovers moving laterally and linear, Marchenko is one of the league’s better players at doing so. I notice him the most doing this in transition, sometimes coming up the half wall in the O Zone as well, but mostly in transition.
Efficiency in crossover usage comes a lot from making the crossover look more like a forward stride with full extension. When you think about a forward stride, you want alignment in your front toe (on your front skate), the upper knee closest to be bent and in line with the toe, and the chin to be aligned there as well. This creates depth in the stride and depth in the recovery and posture, where the players can efficiently gain speed and power without having to use excessive crossovers.
When it comes to Marchenko, one of the things I notice from him is the depth he gets in his stride usage. Marchenko likes to lean in a lot with his upper body when he moves and when he skates, but he is great at really leveraging his push offs on his outside edges to really dig into the ice and gain traction when striding.
When we watch Marchenko’s goal the other night against Montreal, we notice that hop and that movement off his outside edges that really drives the movement through his lower body footwork. He accelerates off his toes, his shin angle looks close to 45 degrees, he is leaning in with his upper body, there’s great knee bend in his front knee, and he is in more of a dynamic posture to allow him to be shiftier off the rush here.
The swing under in the D Zone allows Marchenko to support underneath the puck with a bit of speed initially, and then Marchenko settles a bouncing puck in the neutral zone and gains speed right away through crossover usage. Notice Marchenko’s movement. Some players like rapid crossovers, an example would be Nathan MacKinnon and how powerful and rapidly he likes to quickly use crossovers, and with Marchenko here, he is a bit more efficient in using his recovery and his crossover usage here. He doesn’t rapidly use crossovers, which uses excessive energy, and Marchenko’s longer strides helps him still gain speed without too much energy being used.
On the entry, Marchenko does a great job quickly changing the angle on his shot using multiple factors:
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Marchenko did a great job reading the lane off the rush right away, and then quickly looking to find space on the net while weight transferring through the shot.
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2 个月Marchenko is definitely one of the most underrated players in the league.