Lessons on strategy from the San Jose Sharks
Last night, the San Jose Sharks defeated the Nashville Predators 5-0 in Game 7 to advance to the Western Conference Finals in the NHL's Stanley Cup Playoff tournament. The Sharks started the year slowly, but steadily evolved into one of the top teams in the league, especially over the last two months of the season, leveraging key contributions from erstwhile veterans Joe Pavelski, Patrick Marleau and especially 38-year-old Joe Thornton into the 3rd seeding in the very robust Western Conference. While the Sharks have a fairly tortured history of losing in many Game 7s over the years, last night they dialed up the compete level and never looked back in blowing out the overmatched Predators.
"Business lessons from sporting events" metaphors can sometimes be overplayed (sorry!). But the Stanley Cup is renowned as being "the hardest trophy to win in professional sports," due primarily to the fact that the winning team is almost always subject to a rough, highly physical, months-long grind against elite, motivated, and singularly-focused talent. Skating a lap with the Cup aloft takes grit and heart (or as my friends here call it, "grart"), of course, but mostly it requires the replicable, quantifiable application of a competitive strategy, in particularly adverse conditions, that leverages the strengths of both the team and the individual players.
Here are a couple of lessons on competitive strategy that I took away from last night's Sharks game.
Keep it simple - and execute, execute, execute.
If you listen to any pre-game interview with virtually any hockey player or coach, you will inevitably hear the phrase "get pucks deep" offered as a response to the standard question about strategy for a particular game. This ubiquitous, innocuously cliched answer seems like a standard throwaway quote from a disinterested and harried athlete - but it belies a simple but critical strategic focus. In hockey parlance, "getting pucks deep" means skating or shooting the puck deep into the offensive zone, as close to the front of the net as possible. There's an old axiom in hockey that's almost universally true: good things tend to happen when you get pucks deep (or "get pucks to the net").
One of the metrics used to quantify team and player performance in NHL games is Shot Attempts (SA), which is further stratified into a stat called Scoring Chances (SC). Shots attempts can happen from anywhere on the ice; scoring chances, however, are classified as events that are more likely to change the score outcome, and are as such a more valuable indicator of quality of team and individual play than SA. Scoring chances are further drilled down into what are known as High Danger Scoring Chances (HDSC), which indicate significant opportunities to affect outcomes. It should come as no surprise that most HDSC take place directly in front of the net, as a result of...you guessed it, getting pucks deep.
At this point, you're probably (rightly) asking "What does any of this hockey talk have to do with strategy execution?" This is the Shot Attempts location chart from last night's game:
On the left are the Sharks' shot attempts and scoring chances, in black - the green diamonds represent goals scored. On the right are the Predators' scoring chances. You'll note that nearly all of the Sharks' scoring chances were high danger (circled in red), including all of the goals. Similarly, note that the Predators had very few high danger chances. Both teams attempted to use the same strategy - get pucks deep. The difference in outcome is due to execution. The Sharks kept the strategy simple, and then focused on executing - repeatedly and persistently. Their efforts were rewarded with the victory.
Let your best players lead the way in a big spot
The elite, core talent that's been doing it all year for the Sharks rose to the occasion of a pressure-packed Game 7 last night. The Sharks got goals and primary assists from their best players: Thornton, Marleau, Pavelski, Logan Couture. Notable for all of those players, particularly Thornton and Pavelski, is their willingness and ability to go to the "dirty areas" of the ice (like the front of the net, where the play is heavy and physical), and execute the strategy. The axiom is, again, fairly simple: in a tough competitive situation, let your best talent lead the way.
But remember...depth is also important
Productively deploying 4 forward lines has been the hallmark of most successful (Cup-winning) teams over the past decade or so. Forward lines are usually defined by a hierarchy of sorts - the 1st and 2nd lines are usually made up of high-skill players (goal scorers), the 3rd line is typically a low-event defensive line with some scoring touch, and the 4th line is usually made up of lower-skill "checkers" who are responsible for lock-down defense of the other team's scoring line(s). In the "modern" NHL, strategies built around maintaining possession of the puck have become paramount for most successful teams. Quality of team and player performances are now routinely quantified by statistics related to length and timeliness of puck possession. And that focus brings to light the last important thing I took away from last night's game: being able to rely on depth of talent is critical in a competitive environment.
Case in point - the Sharks' 4th line center, Dainius Zubrus. At 37 years old and a veteran of more than 1000 NHL games, he's mostly responsible for driving the Sharks' checking line. His "skills" rarely show up in the box score - he has 2 goals and 2 assists for 4 total points on the season. But the Sharks are a puck-possession team, and they rely on the "less skilled" Zubrus to take regular shifts for a very good reason: He's good at holding on to the puck, with a season-long possession percentage of over 50%, despite playing against the best skill players and starting in his own (defensive) zone with the puck more than half the time. Last night's game was no different. Execution of strategy requires the best to lead the way, but having a deep group of role players and specialists is vital to overall team success.
The Sharks are now on to play the St. Louis Blues in the Western Conference Finals, with the winner moving on to the Stanley Cup Final. Whether you're a hardcore hockey fan or new to the Cup playoffs, try to catch some of the games if you can. You never know what you might learn about, and apply to, your own "Stanley Cup" moments.