Patrik Laine has long been an enigmatic hockey player. In some ways his unique personality are a refreshing departure from the ordinary and that has been especially true in his time with the Blue Jackets.
Across the two previous seasons, Patrik Laine put up 108 points in 111 games. As far as rate stats go, this put Laine at 3.08 points/60, good for 41st in the league (among players with at least 1000 all-situations minutes) according to EvolvingHockey.com.
At 5v5, Patrik Laine ranked 45th (once again, 1000 minutes at 5v5 the cutoff) with 2.39 points/60.
In 2023-2024, however, Patrik Laine has been a shell of himself with 3 points in the 9 games prior to his first career healthy scratch.
The Data
In looking through some of the mistakes plaguing the Blue Jackets, I uncovered some of the more prescient microstats from AllThreeZones as they relate to Patrik Laine’s play.
In this, I discovered that Patrik Laine had become nearly the most inefficient puck carrier in the NHL.
Now, first things first here, this is an extremely limited sample size. As of the creation of this chart, Corey Sznajder had only tracked 5 CBJ games.
The horizontal axis is, perhaps, inappropriately named. There are plenty of entries that can be categorized as “turnovers”, dumps and misplayed entries where the puck still “got deep.” This metric was created by adding all entry attempts (carries, dumps) to entry failures to create “entry attempts”. Then the number of entry failures is divided by the total number of “entry attempts”.
This way, players who choose to dump the puck are not overrepresented in terms of entry failure rate but players who try to do hard things (carries/60) are rewarded along the vertical axis.
The point isn’t necessarily to create a holistic ranking of best entry players, but to display some of the inefficiencies present in the Blue Jackets transition game.
Patrik Laine turned the puck over on nearly 1/4 of all of his entry attempts across this sample. If he wants to be a primary puck carrier, he’ll have to get much more efficient. The how of the improvement is going to be where the more interesting conclusions are drawn.
The Flaws
It would be really easy to say that the center experiment has failed for Patrik Laine. I’m not necessarily here to say either way, as he’s had remarkably few games in which to adjust. Part of the short leash is a young roster searching for solutions to problems, part of that is a roster that doesn’t have strong skillsets with which to insulate new centers.
A lot of Laine’s struggles scaffold into a few habits and skills where he’s significantly deficient. To put it this way, since Patrik Laine doesn’t want to use his body to his advantage, it has become a weakness.
There’s a difference in John Tortorella asking Laine to put his shoulder down and drive to the net like a power-forward and asking a player to use their body to dictate outcomes on the ice. If Laine could use his weight to insulate the puck he would buy himself significantly more time to find clean lanes for his cross-ice delay plays. If Elias Pettersson, weighing all of 176 lbs, can use his body to dictate outcomes, Patrik Laine certainly can.
Furthermore, his lack of scanning and shoulder-checking the ice means he doesn’t have the awareness to play fast to overcome his body weakness. That his puck-handling further bleeds chances only serves to highlight these previous weaknesses. When it gets bad for Patrik Laine, it gets painful.
Said a different way, if Patrik Laine can fix a few of his habits, namely his poor use (and understanding) of puck support resulting in a “homerun swing” playstyle, his preference to use stick-work over his feet when defending and his lack of shoulder checking and ice-scanning, he could be a pillar of the Blue Jackets going forward. If not, there will continue to be thrilling hot-streaks and miserable cold-streaks.
The Tape
Puck Support
Before we get too far into Patrik Laine, it’s worth mentioning that, as a whole, the Blue Jackets don’t use puck support incredibly well. The team doesn’t display a high degree of sophistication in neutral zone play almost across the roster.
While Johnny Gaudreau’s poor performance to start the year certainly had an impact on Laine’s production, the team structure as a whole likely had an impact on both. I’ll write more on the neutral zone and rush attack shortly, but for now we can look at what specifically happens in respect to Laine’s game.
Here are a few clips from Laine, specifically in regard to his lack of puck support use and preference for 1v1 play.
In the first clip, Laine is a wing and receives the puck in a common breakout position. Here, he has a quick but slightly backwards option in Boone Jenner. From this point of view, it’s not the best option but we can reasonably conclude that Jenner was within Laine’s vision. Additionally, the defender is striding and Jenner is behind his heels. A stride or two from this point, and there’s a clear lane to Jenner and the defender would not be able to pivot and Jenner would have access to dangerous and open ice.
Instead of letting the support play with Jenner develop, Laine instead goes completely cross-ice into a turnover.
Here, Laine finds himself in a similar breakout position. Laine’s close support here is Gaudreau, who is in the middle of the ice and it would be quite a difficult pass. Laine is a skilled area passer, and a well weighted pass would give Gaudreau the option to dump at the red line.
Additionally, Laine can also delay and pass off the defender’s heels to Werenski, who is on the far side of the ice and, once again, a bit south. This play is harder to find but is certainly better than the cross-ice pass with a defender in a balanced and explosive position. The result was an easy interception and immediate zone entry for the Red Wings.
Here, Patrik Laine retrieves a puck in the middle of the D zone. He has an immediate pass option to the waiting stick of Zach Werenski (who has full vision of the ice), but instead opts to carry himself and attacks the defender 1v1. While it wasn’t clean, Laine came out with the puck and gained the neutral zone.
Now, because he chose to make the slower play and carry the puck, he is being pursued well by the Ranger’s backcheck. He could play a backhand to space as a read to all of the Ranger’s defense being on his half of the ice. This would be difficult, but as long as the pass gets passed the first layer, it is likely to be recovered by the Blue Jackets. Laine could also read this coverage and opt to chip the puck deep or hard rim to better numbers.
Instead, Laine loses the puck just after the blue line and the Rangers counter attack. Those players utilize 2 backhand passes through layers to gain the Blue Jackets zone.
This mistake wasn’t so much on Laine’s puck carrying but on his neutral zone rush attack. He doesn’t attack the heels of the Rangers defense to create space for his teammate and the mediocre pass instead bounces off his skates.
Ideally, Laine strides hard through the neutral zone and toward the strong-side dot. We’ll explore this move more when we talk about the Blue Jackets rush attack in general.
Next, the puck is chipped to Laine who is building speed in the middle of the ice. Here, Laine has a lot of time, space, and speed but also a series of teammates who are also ahead of the defense. He never takes a look at them.
Instead, he gains the zone and tries to beat his defender 1v1. He fails, and the Penguins recover the puck. This would have been an excellent time for him to delay and hit 78 or 9 as a second wave of attack. It would have been risky, as he is carrying the puck close to the defender, but any series of shoulder checks prior to gaining the zone would have allowed him to carry in a safer position.
Later in that same shift, Severson hands Laine the puck at speed. While Kuraly isn’t in the most secure position at the line, Laine doesn’t appear to consider bumping him the puck and attacking the nearest defender to create a 2v1. Instead, he glides to the middle of the ice, between 4 Penguins defenders, and loses the puck.
The Penguins, on the ensuing counterattack, show a pretty good example of how to create space, layers and speed differentials (through weaving and exchanging lanes) such that even in the case of being defended well, they still have a Plan B that includes possession.
Next, Laine gains possession on the strong side wall and skates in simply a straight line to the opposing zone.
Despite having good time and space, there are no weaving routes and no significant pace to the play. Once Laine hits the blue line, he has Kuraly skating towards a close support to create a 2v1. He is being defended by a forward skating backward and as such is a good target to attack on the rush. Laine misses it, or doesn’t like it, and loses the puck quite easily during his misguided delay attempt.
The last clip is from the most recent game against the Boston Bruins. Here, Adam Fantilli is engaged in a battle and wisely lets it continue to buy space for his teammates. Patrik Laine has limited desire to use this pick play, moving the puck early to Texier or a little later to Provorov, and instead moves the puck north.
He attempts a meek chip behind the defense, they recover but are under pressure and give the puck back to a reloading Blue Jackets group.
This reload isn’t quite as easy, but we see Laine ignore a couple of opporunities to use Adam Fantilli and get his legs moving in support. Instead, he delays and finds the middle. He hands off the puck to a defenseman attacking the teeth of the Bruins’ rush defense. The outcome is predictable.
Lack of Scanning and Stick-over-Body defending
The last two poor habits can be best observed at perhaps the same time.
This clip is a culmination of a couple of Laine’s flaws. He doesn’t prefer to use body positioning and proactive skating and certainly loves violently attacking with his stick. Give this clip a watch and pay attention to Laine’s line of sight. I counted one solid shoulder check.
Now go ahead and watch it again, but this time focus on David Jiricek. The positional requirements are quite different, but Jiricek spends a lot more of his down time looking over his shoulders and around the ice.
In the end, Laine is surprised by his check and his habit of getting involved with his stick shines through, culminating in a penalty. Now, you would be right to conclude that this is a long shift and bad things tend to happen on long shifts, but across my sports training I’ve always been taught that your performance, especially in difficult and exhausting situations, falls to the level of your habits.
Going Forward
All these flaws aside, they aren’t to say that Patrik Laine is a poor player and without merit. He still has among the best shooting talent in the league. He can softly weight area passes that help create speed differentials and he’s generally in the right position defensively. Refining these habits should help him convert on his plays, offensively or defensively, at a higher rate.
Lassi Alanen, a Finnish hockey scout for EliteProspects, recently put out an incredible thread analyzing Laine’s game post-scratch. It’s all in Finnish, but google translate can give you the gist. (shoutout to google translate for turning healthy scratch to “Stand Command”).
TL;DR: Laine has been better since being scratched but that’s an incredibly low bar to clear. Alanen believes that the Laine at C experiment should end and that, at this age and stage of his career, asking Laine to make major changes, or add major layers, to his game is a fool’s errand. At this point, it should be the Blue Jacket’s and Laine’s objective to hide his weaknesses and maximize his strengths.
Part of that responsibility will lay with Laine. In order to maximize and hide, he’ll have to change some of these habits. The first, and least negotiable, is shoulder checking. This simple behavior will help prepare him for the next play. The more prepared he is, the less he’ll need to rely on late stick checks and the more he can make up for his low-acceleration.
The second, and this is primarily the Columbus Blue Jackets, will be a more structured and layered rush attack. I’ll write more on this soon but it could be as simple as letting him develop chemistry with Fantilli or acquiring another capable neutral zone Center.
I said it on Reddit..great article