Rick Tocchet Says His Defensemen Are Too Eager, and He Picked a Word Nobody Expected
Rick Tocchet was asked about the Flyers’ struggles and diagnosed his defensemen as being, in his word, horny. He meant they are jumping into the attack too early and too deep, and it is costing Philadelphia scoring chances.
Crude word, correct hockey.
What he is actually describing
This is one of the most common structural problems in modern hockey and one of the least discussed outside coaching rooms. The league has spent 15 years telling defensemen to be offensive contributors. Analytics rewarded activation. Puck-moving defensemen got paid, stay-at-home defensemen stopped getting drafted.
The result is a generation of blueliners who read a half-chance and go, and whose instinct is to join the rush rather than support it. When it works, you get a four-man attack and an odd-man rush. When it does not, your defenseman is below the circles and the other team has numbers going the other way.
Tocchet’s complaint is specifically about timing and depth. Too early, too deep. Not that they are joining the play, but that they are joining it before it exists and then standing somewhere they cannot recover from.
He is the right coach to say it
Tocchet played 18 NHL seasons and finished with more than 1,000 points and more than 2,900 penalty minutes, which is an almost impossible combination. He was a skilled player who spent a career in the hard areas of the ice.
Coaches with that resume tend to have a low tolerance for structure failures dressed up as aggression. He is not telling his defensemen to stop producing. He is telling them that joining a rush is a decision with a cost, and that they have been making it for free.
The word choice is doing work
He could have said impatient. He could have said they are overcommitting, or cheating for offense, which is the standard phrase. He used a word that got the quote on every hockey show in North America instead.
That is probably the point. A coach can tell a defenseman he is overcommitting in a video session 40 times and watch him do it again on Saturday. Telling him publicly, in a word that will follow him into the room and onto the bus and into his phone, is a different kind of message.
It is also the sort of thing that works exactly once. The second time, it is just a coach being crude about his players in public, and it costs him the room.
The underlying problem is still the roster
Coaching language does not fix a blue line. If Philadelphia’s defensemen are activating badly, part of that is reads and part of it is that the Flyers do not have enough forwards generating offense without help from behind them. Defensemen jump when the attack in front of them is not producing.
Tocchet almost certainly knows that too. He is coaching the part he can control, which is the decision-making, and he picked a word designed to make sure the message landed.
It landed. Now the question is whether anybody on that blue line stays home on the next odd-man rush.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
