Andrew Peeke weighs 214 pounds. The Boston Bruins defenseman has reached a top speed of 33.67 km/h.
By multiplying his mass and acceleration, you can imagine the force with which Peeke arrives on the spot when he gets the green light to squeeze down the right wall. Usually he hits his spots with his feet on the boards, his stick pointed toward the center of the ice, and everything else is sent to the poor player in the other uniform, who is tasked with getting a puck off the wall.
Every time you make contact, the attacker loses his balance, maybe just a hair, Peeke says. That causes them to have to hold on again instead of taking immediate action. So I like to go for a little bit of contact, whether it’s with my hip or a push in the back to get him to lean forward.
Think about how often this scenario happens during an NHL game. Defenders, from pace pushers to stay-at-homers, are constantly going around the walls to extend time in the offensive zone.
Everyone is in a pinch these days, says Bruins coach Marco Sturm. Everyone.
You can then imagine the brightness of the warning lights that come on when a player has to cleanly grab the puck from the wall. It is almost always controversial. There is pain. More often than not, players need to use their backhand. Then think about how the puck usually rolls, bounces, bounces and does a little dance, except that it behaves and lies flat.
The consequences of not clearing the puck include a goal against and a place on the bench.
They’ve got Miles Wood coming at you at 25 miles per hour. You’re going to run the boards, skills coach Jon Lounsbury says of the 6-foot-4, 209-pound berserker who regularly serves as the Columbus Blue Jackets’ starting forechecker. You have to learn to protect yourself while those pucks are traveling. I think it’s one of the hardest things to do in sports.
The payoff may be worth the sacrifice. The puck leaves the zone. A rapid outbreak occurs. An emergency situation arises.
If you have a man on the wall who can actually play under pressure, it only adds insult to injury, Sturm says. And if you don’t, you’ll end up back at your end and have to grind it out again. So that’s a big difference.
How do players become difference makers in this critical, but often overlooked art? We asked NHL players and coaches.
When it comes to the best way to get pucks off the wall, one name always comes up: Tampa Bay Lightning right winger Nikita Kucherov.
By far the best, says Bruins Casey Mittelstadt. It’s insane. He plays games at a time without messing up. You see their power play: every time someone is in trouble, they just rim it to them. He takes it and makes a play.
Kucherov was born with rare talent. But he’s also a rink rat and equipment nerd, practicing relentlessly and seeking out advantages he can apply to his craft. In fact, he developed his own stick-blade curve, an adaptation of the P28, which has a heavy toe because he prefers to use the tip of his blade as much for stick handling as for shooting.
As for how he handles his stick, Kucherov employs Adam Oates, the Hall of Famer who is now a frequent skills advisor, to practice the process in the offseason. Kucherov has progressed so far that his stick has seemingly become another limb.
He looks at summer exercises the way anyone would look at lifting weights in the gym, says ex-Lightning teammate Mikey Eyssimont. You do reps and you do three sets of eight of some kind of exercise, the same way you do three sets of eight squats or something like that.
As Lounsbury teaches his clients, the process begins with processing. For example, suppose a defenseman needs to retrieve a puck on the end boards. His first task, even before he turns to chase the puck, is to see where the nine other skaters are. This allows the defenseman to start thinking about where his outs will be and where he doesn’t want the puck to go.
Then, when he approaches the puck, the priority is to put it down neatly and get his eyes up as quickly as possible. There is a good chance that the first forecheck (F1) is already in the defender’s back pocket. With a clean recovery he can put F1 in his rearview mirror and deal with F2.
A clean pick and a good outlet pass can eliminate two forcheckers. A bump or panicked edge, on the other hand, kicks the can down the road and becomes a problem for teammates.
If you can’t handle the puck, there’s no next move, says Lounsbury, who worked with Oates before starting his own consulting firm. Maybe you can give it to the next guy. But then he’ll have to sort it out and keep it from bouncing. You can always keep the puck moving. And some teams do that too. They tell their defenders to move back and when it’s on the edge they just keep rimming it the other way. But then you rely on your attacker to play the puck from the rim.
Ultimately, if we can handle it, we’ll take it off the wall and make the next play, with our teams coming out cleaner every time.
It may be that a defender’s hurried edge gives his wing the chance to save the day. The good players, like Kucherov, control their backhand to pick up pucks, spin them off the glass and get them out or move the puck to the center, which should enter low and slow in the middle of the defensive zone.
But it’s not just about handling the puck. Part of the maneuver requires manipulating the arrival of a pinching defender. This creates a critical separation that allows the puck to move.
You have to get an inch under the man, says Lounsbury. I need to be able to time the D down and get a little bit toward the puck. Push myself off the wall or push the puck an inch back where it came from to take the next action.
Execution, or lack thereof, can turn a game on its head. Some players have taken the initiative to influence the results.
It takes away the limits of your game if you can clear pucks from the wall, says Eyssimont. You have fewer limits on the game you can create and the skills you can use. You’re not so busy fighting the yellow.
In 2022-2023, Jake Neighbors averaged 12 minutes, 26 seconds of ice time for the St. Louis Blues as a first-year pro. Craig Berube, then-Neighbors coach, rewarded players with attention to detail with ice time.
Neighbors wanted to come in.
Wall works one of those little things, says 2020 first-round pick. If you get really good at it, you’ll be trusted in a lot of situations and earn a lot of trust from your coaches and teammates. It just finds more ice time and more opportunity.
The following year, Neighbors jumped to 15:42 playing time per game. He scored 27 goals and 11 assists. Part of the lefty forward’s job was to win pucks off the boards and get them to Robert Thomas, Jordan Kyrou and Pavel Buchnevich.
Neighbors plays every situation differently. Against bigger defensemen, the 6-foot-1, 201-pounder prefers to eat the puck rather than let it kick up the middle for an opponent to retrieve. When he faces a smaller defenseman, he feels more comfortable trying to get the puck and, for example, make a play under Thomas.
If I have a moment to take the puck off the wall and look for it, it’s usually underneath, says Buren, who hired Oates with wall work in mind. If I can bump into him, that’s great. If not, I want to play it off the wall behind me so he can skate it. I think it’s offensive. It’s the same when you play low in the O-zone. The quicker you can grab a puck off the wall and look up the middle to see if anyone is there, that’s how fast the game is right now. The quicker you can figure it out, see your options and get control of the puck, the better off you will be.
Like Neighbors, Mittelstadt (6-1, 207 pounds) is not an imposing forward. But he’s developed his puck-picking skills to the point where Sturm considers him the Bruins’ best in practice.
The left-shot forward credits the hours he spends at his backyard rink in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, as fundamental to building his hands. The sheet, designed and maintained by his father Tom, was only large enough for two-on-two matches. Limited real estate encouraged skills and creativity.
As he progressed to the NHL, Mittlestadt also turned to Oates. During summer on-ice skills, Mittelstadt estimates he spends 30 minutes per session clearing pucks off the boards. Appropriately, Mittelstadt uses an Oates curve, a flatter blade that he thinks helps him grab pucks with his backhand.
The most important thing is to handle it gracefully, keep your head up and find the next piece, says Mittelstadt. There are different progressions of how you will change and how you will deal with it. But the most important thing is to keep your head up and figure out where you want to go.
Neither Neighbors nor Mittelstadt considers themselves a natural at puck picking. Like Kucherov, they put the technology into practice. Nothing stops other players from doing the same.
One thousand percent learnable skills, says Lounsbury. It takes time and effort. But it is a daily driver for some of these athletes. It’s something they have to keep working on. It doesn’t take much. You don’t need hours a day guys. But it is certainly a skill that needs to be worked on.
The hand position is different when taking the puck from a corner than when shooting at goal. Proper stick choice also influences success and failure. A defenseman who prefers a stick with high flexibility for impact may give up a touch with a rimmed puck.
A stiff shaft may help you shoot the puck better, says Blues coach Jim Montgomery. But to pick up an edge along the wall, you need a little flexibility in your shaft to be able to cushion it.
When equipment, habits and situational play align, the result can be a game-changing outcome. Sometimes an opposing attacker is too late to rotate high to cover a pinching defender. It’s making a strange-man rush.
In the worst case, you squeeze and have no forward support, says Peeke. If they hit the center, they get a two-on-one. You look like the bad guy.
A sharp puck picker also sees the difference in his wallet. Montgomery ranked Pat Maroon as one of the best he has coached. The three-time Stanley Cup champion played in 848 career games before retiring after the 2024-25 season. He would have been out of the league sooner if he hadn’t been so good at getting pucks off the wall and out of the defensive zone.
Once a player learns this skill, their ability to play clearly increases, Lounsbury says. The better you can do this, the more points you can collect. And it’s not even about points.
If we can get one more played per game, that’s 82 more games per year. Will you get a few more points from that? Yes.
