When Doug Weight brings up the term “puck management” with his players, he worries that he starts “sounding like Charlie Brown’s teacher — they’re not really listening.”
Having been in that chair as a player not long ago, Weight understands. But the Islanders coach wanted to emphasize his point recently, so he used some stats instead.
“They have to get it across in their mind that we usually double our turnovers in our losses,” Weight said Wednesday at the Islanders’ morning skate. “It’s a stat that was eye-opening for a lot of those guys. But I just cherry-picked 10 games that I liked, good and bad, and it was almost double to a number of turnovers [in losses].”
Weight offered the stat after he was asked about how the Islanders might slow down the Stars on Wednesday night at Barclays Center. It was just the beginning of a long-winded, nearly three-minute answer about playing at their own pace and in their own structure, culminating in one central focus: “Manage the damn puck.”
It proved prophetic as the Islanders came out sloppy and finished with 14 giveaways in a 5-2 loss at Barclays Center.
“When you turn it over, it’s tough,” third-line center Brock Nelson said. “You’re stopping and going, coming back and playing defense more. We want to be smart at the blue lines and feed our speed. With that said, you still want to be able to make plays and create offense. There’s a fine line you gotta walk between.”
The Islanders have the same staffers charting turnovers during each game so that there’s no bias, Weight said. He ran the numbers and got tangible results to relay to his team.
“Our goals are higher, our [offensive]-zone time is higher and our shots are higher when we have half the turnovers,” Weight said.
It may seem like a simple concept, and an area that every team in the league would like to cut down on, but Weight had a larger point to prove with his group.
Only seven years removed from playing himself, Weight said he understood “it’s a different world” in the NHL today and that puck management might not be high on the priority list for everyone.
“It’s not selfishness on these players, it’s just the world we live in,” he said. “So they look at all these stats and they get in their head and they have their coaches that teach them how to make plays at the blue line and then we’re telling them opposite things.
“What I try to get across is I know everybody in the room wants to win first. That’s the first thing, it’s about the team. But secondly, it’s OK to think about your contract and your future and how many points you get. That’s setting goals for yourself. But what I try to prove to them is, this is going to feed both. Manage the damn puck.”
By Weight’s calculations, the Islanders are averaging almost two more goals per game when they have half the turnovers. That means an extra five or six points, and spread out over an 82-game schedule, “It’s 400 [more] points for your team if you do it every game.”
Weight conceded that it wasn’t going to happen every game, but the mad scientist’s point got across.
“It kind of feeds our offense when we’re playing smart and getting pucks in deep and letting our forecheck go to work,” said winger Josh Bailey, who began Wednesday with a team-high 33 points.
The Islanders brought a 17-10-3 record into this meeting with the Stars, only two points out of first place in the Metropolitan Division. But if they can learn to more carefully manage the puck, their coach believes they can be even better.
“In speaking with a few of the leaders,” Weight said, “they recognize that when we play fast and we play with big-time purpose every shift and roll our lines over, that’s when we’re at our best.”
Johnny Boychuk returned to the ice after a three-game absence with a lower-body injury and recorded a team-high six shots in 17:40 of ice time. Dennis Seidenberg was the healthy scratch while Thomas Hickey missed a second straight game with an upper-body injury.
Anders Lee’s two third-period goals gave him 19 on the year, good for sole possession of third place in the NHL. Nikita Kucherov and Alex Ovechkin both have 21.