“As a player you have to be self-aware and either impose your will or be flexible”: In Conversation with Jack Han
Hockey consultant Jack Han catches up with The Hockey News to discuss the Red Wings, the value of stars versus depth in roster construction, and the importance of self-awareness to player development
- SAM STOCKTON
- MAY 30, 2024 8:00 AM EDT
- THEHOCKEYTOURNAMENTRESOURCE.COM
- thehockeyresource.com
Jack Han is a hockey coaching consultant who has worked with the McGill University women’s team, the Toronto Maple Leafs and Marlies, and in the Professional Hockey Federation, the Swiss National League, and the Finnish Liiga. Last week, THN spoke with Jack via Zoom, discussing a variety of Red Wings, tactical, and developmental topics from Moritz Seider’s usage to the importance of considering role at the NHL level in assessing a potential draft pick. If you’re intrigued by what Jack has to say, you might be interested in seeing him speak next month in Ann Arbor, at The Coaches Site annual conference hosted by the University of Michigan.
The Hockey News: I wanted to get started with a question that I know had a lot of Red Wings fans pre-occupied this season. There was a lot of conversation about the way Derek Lalonde leaned on Moritz Seider to play ridiculously difficult minutes. How do you assess the value in deploying your number one defenseman that way?
Jack Han: “So, first, we can take a look at the front office view on this, and there’s two things. I’m talking generally, but when you draft a defenseman who really has the ceiling to be a top pair, all-situations defenseman who can play against the opposing team’s best players, at some point you need to put them in the situation where he actually does that. And basically, you can’t win because you’re either doing it too early or too late, so Detroit is probably skewing too early, whereas if you look at some other situations, maybe teams are not giving enough of a role or enough trust to their young defensemen.
“Perhaps the best case scenario is what’s been happening with Evan Bouchard in Edmonton. Now he’s really taken over a top pair role. He’s always been more of an offensive player, but now we see him playing, first of all, the most minutes but, second, taking on the best competition. Whereas it used to be more [Darnell] Nurse and [Cody] Ceci. For the Red Wings, they don’t really have that supporting cast and obviously the team is not as good as the Oilers are right now, so they’re hoping to get at least a good track record of evidence before they either decide to go long-term with Seider or maybe give him a bridge deal. They want to know what they have, because when you’re talking about a three-year [Entry Level Contract], that time actually comes up quite quickly, and by the second half of year two, you’ve gotta be ready to make a decision on a player, whether that player is gonna be exactly who you thought he was gonna be or maybe you have to go out and get somebody better.”
THN: So if I’m following you here, it sounds as though, to you, if Seider’s able to play these kinds of hard minutes consistently and well, that would be worthwhile to the point that you aren’t too worried what this usage might cost him (namely, scoring more)?
JH: “I’m not saying I’m not worried. I’m just saying there’s a clear motivation for teams to have that internal discussion or to have that plan. The thing with throwing a player this young into this tough of minutes is it actually does the team a favor because it sort of tanks their counting stats, which is obviously how most players get paid in this league. If you take a player like Seider and you deploy him in an extremely defensive way, and maybe you don’t put the emphasis on his offensive play, he’s not gonna score as many goals or score as many assists. You’re not making him worse, but you’re gonna be able to get him for cheaper because when agents typically negotiate, they look at points, and it’s not necessarily the best comparable or the one that makes the most sense, especially for defenseman, but that’s how a lot of negotiations go, and it’s sort of a way to artificially reduce the player’s open market value. So for the Red Wings, I kinda see this for them, and the main risk that they’re taking is not so much that not scoring 40 or 50 points is going to make Seider a worse player but if you put him in overly difficult minutes, what could end up happening is he becomes way more hesitant to join the play and activate and he doesn’t get the puck as much, and that side of his game doesn’t really develop as much. Especially for forwards, that happens all the time.
“If a player who is skilled and is used to playing with the puck is all of a sudden only thinking defense, then that offensive part of the game does tend to dry up. So I think that’s more of a legitimate concern. If you’re putting up like 42% Corsi in big samples [Seider’s was 45.7% this year at five-on-five], you’re not gonna have all those reps handling the puck in the O zone or joining the rush, just because you’re always gonna be on the back foot, which in the long term, could become an issue. So it’s definitely a valid point of view, but for Seider, the main thing I see with him is, if he’s going to be more of a shutdown-type top pair guy and you pair him with more of a puck mover, I think he’s just fine. You’re not really relying on him to be a Quinn Hughes or even Evan Bouchard, where he’s the one shooting the puck in the net or creating primary assists. He’s going to be more of a defensive stopper and an offensive facilitator.”
THN: In that capacity, is he someone you would be excited about as your number one defenseman, if you were running a team?
JH: “I watched a lot of him in his draft year and when he was in the AHL and when he was in Sweden. I kept fairly close tabs on him. I was one of the people who was very surprised that the Wings took him sixth overall—very high pick for a defenseman, who didn’t have dominant counting stats. But I got a good look at him up close in Traverse City in his first camp in 2019, and he does a lot of the things that you want your top shutdown defenseman to do, without being a total offensive liability, so I think that’s always gonna be the role that he’s gonna play. You can put a Shayne Gostisbehere with him, and Seider’s gonna keep up, both in terms of his skating and his processing speed, and that’s tremendously valuable, because if you go on the open market, there’s not gonna be too many guys who have the size, who have the skating, who also have the hockey sense to keep up with really good players.”
THN: And then to pivot to the other player, that all Red Wings fans have at the front of their minds right now, I’m curious what, if anything, stood out to you about Lucas Raymond’s growth this season and, whether after a career high in goals and shooting percentage, you see room for further growth in his game?
JH: “I’ll preface this by seeing that I didn’t watch a ton of him this year, certainly less than in previous years, but when you look back at his track record leading up to the draft and his first rookie season, he made a very quick adjustment to the North American pro game. He was a good scorer in Europe already. He’s developing as expected, more or less. You mentioned a career-best shooting percentage—well, it’s about the right time for him to start having some career-best season. It seems like he was a good pick for Detroit, as he’s looked all along. He’s right on track.”
THN: And then at a more macro level, I’d be curious to hear your perspective on the Red Wings’ identity under Derek Lalonde. To what extent do you see him porting things over directly from what he was doing with Jon Cooper and the Lightning in his current vision for the team?
JH: “I know a lot of the schematics they’re using now were heavily influenced by his time in Tampa, which makes sense, right? If you were comfortable as a coach with something, it’s more likely that you’ll stick with it. The main thing with Detroit is they’re trying to make that turnaround a little bit quicker, which I see that strategy getting some push back online. A lot of people would prefer them maybe tank a little more and amass one or two more star players and then to really go for it. But I don’t hate the strategy, because if you look around the league—the Ottawas, the Buffalo Sabres, the Columbus Blue Jackets—sometimes when you spend too many years not playing meaningful games, it does create some underlying problems that you can’t fix just by getting one or two more players. Before the season, I foresaw them as perhaps a playoff team or maybe just a little bit better than they actually were, but I think they’re right on track. If they don’t make the playoffs next year, perhaps we’re gonna start seeing some second-guessing or some more legitimate change of direction, but if they make the playoffs next year, they’re right on track for what they want to do.”
THN: On that subject, when it comes to rebuilding teams, where do you see the benefit in trying to accelerate in that way with free agent signings and setting up a dynamic in which young players have to beat someone out to take over a roster spot?
JH: “The one reference point I can point to is when I was working in women’s hockey with McGill University, one of the things that our coaching staff would do very consciously was if we had let’s say a promising recruit, a promising first-year player, we would start that player off with a third- or fourth- or maybe even a fifth-year player and in a respectable role. So if we had a rookie let’s say left shot defenseman who we thought was going to be a top pair player for us down the road, we weren’t overly shy about having her play some top pair minutes but with a really good partner. And if you’re on a team that’s going scorched earth rebuild, you don’t really have those opportunities, and if you follow a lot of the analytical research out there, you know that basically quality of teammate is about three or four times more significant than quality of competition, just because you’re always playing with the same people as opposed to matching up against different lines. And again, the fact that let’s say the Red Wings have Dylan Larkin and Alex DeBrincat and David Perron, it helps Lucas Raymond because he knows that he has to do something to earn his role on the power play or in the top six, but also these people are getting him the puck. And again, how do you weigh that between maybe finishing middle of the pack, barely miss the playoffs, and missing out on a lottery pick versus getting that lottery pick but not having that infrastructure? It’s hard to say, but there’s certainly a logic behind it?”
THN: And one more Red Wings-specific question. I think there has been a decent amount of consternation within the fan base about the viability of a Cup contender with Dylan Larkin as its number one center. What do you make of that proposition?
JH: “I would say it’s fine, as long as you have enough good players in addition to Dylan Larkin. It’s kind of a cop out answer, but teams have won the Cup with worse top centers than Dylan Larkin. If you can’t surround him properly, then you have a problem, but if you surround him well, with a team that’s solid on the back end with good goaltending and a deep group of forwards, I don’t see a problem. One good example is Dallas. In a vacuum, who would you have between Dylan Larkin and Roope Hintz? You can go one way or the other, but there’s no denying that Dallas is a very solid top–to-bottom team with three scoring lines and a fourth line that can check and keep the game low event. So Roope Hintz’ absence or presence doesn’t really make or break the team…For the Red Wings to be a really dominant team, that’s really what they should aspire to.”
THN: Do you think there’s an advantage to being a star driven team versus a depth driven team as far as the current state of roster construction under the salary cap? It feels a bit as though we’ve been trending away from a ‘stars and scrubs’ model and toward a bit more of an emphasis on quality depth.
JH: “It’s just economics, right? The example is when I was in Toronto, obviously we had a very top heavy roster construction, and the guys who ended up being pushed out were the guys making between $1.5-3 million or $1.5 to 5 million even—the [James] Van Riemsdyk’s. Kadri made more than that, but he was a cap casualty. Andreas Johnsson, Kasperi Kapanen, Jake Gardiner, guys like that. And you can build a very good team with three lines or three D pairs of guys who are sort of in the middle class. That’s how Vegas got to the Cup Final in their first season in the league. They had a lot of these middle class guys who got squeezed out of other situations, and maybe some players were legitimately undervalued, but the league is always trending toward being more economically efficient. So when you have a dominant approach, all of a sudden it’s the opposite approach that becomes more attractive, because, again, when teams are going top heavy, these guys that are making $2 and 3 and 4 million, they become available, and maybe they sign for a little bit less, and you should pursue those guys…You can win by having strength at the top of the roster. If you look at Edmonton, that’s how they do it, or you can do it by having still a very strong top of the roster but then having your main competitive advantage being your second and third and fourth line, which is what Dallas is doing. Pretty good example in that playoff matchup there.”
THN: To move into some more general questions about tactics and development, I’m curious about how you perceive the relationship between individual development and overall tactical identity. You always hear this idea that the NHL is “not a development league,” but doesn’t it sort of make sense for a rebuilding team to prioritize that?
JH: “This goes sort of hand-in-hand with what I’m going to present on at The Coaches Site conference. And basically it’s that, if you’re a player who’s aspiring to play at the NHL level for an extended period of time and have a legitimately productive career, both in terms of output and financial gains, you have to be able to find a product-market fit. This is a term that we used a lot when I used to work in the business world. When you look at, especially in the world of start-ups or companies that grow very quickly and become market leaders within five years of being established, I see a lot of parallels between that and being an aspiring NHLer. You don’t necessarily have to have the best product, but it has to respond to a specific niche in the marketplace or a specific need. And you see it all the time where certain players thrive at the NHL level, and they play for a long time until they’re 35 or 40 years old, even though they were never the fastest or had the best shot or had the most explosive production in their early 20s. Whereas other guys start really well, and then they fall off.”
“Some of it is due to habits. Some of it is due to health. But other things are due to, as an individual player, how self-aware are you, and how good are you at identifying opportunities within your team and within the league? If you’re whole identity as a player growing up and in junior is you’re the guy who shoots the puck, you get 30, 40, 50 goals a year, well when you hit the NHL, you have to make a very conscious decision of do I double down on my strength or do I start working on some of the other areas of my game? And the answer is different for everybody, depending on your skillset, your mindset, your mental make-up, the resources you have access to, your physical build. But this idea of finding the product, which is you, and market, which is the team and the league—finding the fit between those two things is really a separating factor between guys who play in the league and do well for a little bit and guys who really have staying power. And I’ll just tie it back to your other question, which is the NHL is not a development league, so how important is it? Well, if you want to be an NHLer, you at least have to have an idea of who you are as an individual, and how best you can channel that to fit into your team do what you’re asked to do. As a player, you have to be self-aware and either impose your will and play the way that you want to and people will accept you for it if you produce, or be more flexible and adjust yourself to what you’re being told to do.”
THN: That’s super interesting, and spiraling off that, something else I was curious about was at what stage in the draft process does it make sense to start thinking about a prospect not just in terms of upside but in terms of the actual role you can envision them thriving in, even as that role may be another two, three, four years away?
JH: “The real answer is that there is no answer, because every single development path is unique. The moment that you think you have an answer to this question then you’re losing your way, because you’re sort of taking your eyes off of the player and what he needs and what he can do for you. Going back to the idea of roles, there’s a very simple heuristic that I use for these things, which is if you take this draft pick and you have the choice between let’s say a second pair right-handed defenseman late in the first round. Well what are the odds that you get a fully formed 25- or 26-year-old second pair right-handed NHL D that’s playing right now? And if you think that there is a better chance for you to get the fully formed player with that draft pick, then you’re probably over-estimated your needs. I see it all the time at the draft where why is it that a team uses probably not a lottery pick but maybe a mid or late first round pick or maybe an early second round pick on this guy, who you’re gonna wait for him to develop for five years before he maybe can play that role. Whereas you take a slightly used NHL regular from another team who can step in right now. [Hoping that you draft and develop a player to fill that role] doesn’t make sense from a net present value point of you.”
BY
Sam Stockton is the Site Editor and Reporter for the Detroit Red Wings team site with The Hockey News. A resident of Detroit, Sam has spent two years writing about hockey and in his spare time, he enjoys walking his dog Pierre, reading, and hanging out on or near lakes. You can follow him on Twitter @_samstockton.
