[Charlie O’Connor] Torts on Drysdale: He’s a candidate to be a rover. Not just a defenseman, but a rover.
Torts on Drysdale: He's a candidate to be a rover. Not just a defenseman, but a rover.
— Charlie O'Connor (@charlieo_conn) January 11, 2024
by seeldoger47
3 Comments
[Here is how rover is defined](https://theathletic.com/144230/2017/11/02/the-rover-how-zach-werenski-and-seth-jones-are-re-defining-the-jackets-blue-line/?source=user_shared_article)
>“Rover.” It’s a term Tortorella has come up with to describe the kind of play that comes innately from 20-year-old Werenski and also 23-year-old Seth Jones. It’s not just playing as an “offensive defenseman” and it’s not transitioning to forward.
>“It’s staying involved even more on the offense,” Tortorella said. “It’s having enough guts when we’re rotating a puck offensively in the corner to go sneak down to the other corner so we can make an east-west play and spread the offensive zone.
>“It’s not just waiting it out at the blue line and waiting for something to come to you. It’s jumping down to the middle, maybe jumping for a hole, lingering a little bit even when the puck is up for grabs…”
>“Every time you make a team switch off in their ‘D’ zone coverage, there’s a gray area,” Jackets assistant coach Brad Shaw said. “The more gray areas we can make happen down there … it can lead to hesitation and I think when we’re skating in the offensive zone, we’re really hard to handle. A big part of that motion is our defensemen getting off the blue line or across the blue line in a hurry to keep trying to make coverages make adjustments.”
>And being a rover isn’t just about one’s play in the offensive zone, it’s about getting the puck into the offensive zone in the first place. Using the tracking work of Corey Sznajder, we can see that the Jackets’ two “rovers” were the most effective players within the team last season as far as creating exits out of the defensive zone that ultimately led to an entry into the offensive zone. Sznajder calls these plays “transitions,” and the more you can create, the better.
Rover is a real thing that used to exist fyi https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rover_(ice_hockey)
Torts always lights up when he talks about danny Boyle or Zack werenski. He totally gets it. But if we’re being honest, every team in the league gets it these days. Since Doughty and Keith were dominating the league decades ago with their highly mobile offensive zone play, every team has realized the importance of dmen that can constantly press forward to create coverage challenges. This is why I really believe every team in the league wants players like Drysdale, it’s still just a matter of there being very few players out there with the full package of skating, skill, and defensive awareness to really pull it off.