Mirtle: The surprising rise of Andreas Borgman – and what it says about where the NHL is headed
It is a lesson that has stayed with Andreas Borgman every game these last few years.
The coach was named Martin Filander, who at the time was the bench boss of Vasteras in Sweden's second division, the Allsvenskan. And his orders — with no exceptions — were that no player could dump the puck out of the zone.
Borgman smiles remembering the edict.
“He actually said we couldn’t rim the puck (around the boards) or nothing like that,” he recalled. “So we had to play it. We had to try to figure it out.
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“Borgman had fantastic numbers last year,” said Simon Brandstrom, whose firm SBPL Sports Data Analytics AB handles data analysis for HV71. “HV destroyed possession wise last year.”
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The biggest reason, he explained, was how he came out of his own zone with the puck.
“He had really good exit numbers,” Brandstrom said. “Carried the puck insanely well.”
Some of that information made it down to the players.
“I saw some statistics, but not all of it,” Borgman said. “But I didn’t focus on that. I was just trying to play good and that would show up… On those teams, we almost never chipped the puck out or anything like that. We always tried to keep it and play through the middle (of the ice). We never actually go the boards and out. We always have to play it out.”
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the NHL currently has 29 Swedish defencemen on pace to play 30 games or more this season — an all-time high.
Including Timothy Liljegren and Calle Rosen, two newcomers with the Marlies, there are 27 Swedish D-men in the AHL right now, the second highest total ever for that league.
Somehow, a tiny European country of under 10 million people is now producing about 12 per cent of the defencemen in the top two North American leagues.
Players who have come up in Sweden's development system credit the way they are taught to play the game from a young age.
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Sweden started to introduce a new nationwide training protocol for defencemen about 15 years ago. Ekman-Larsson said he noticed it as a teenager, in some of the new concepts that were being brought in by coaches to his small club team in Tingsryd.
The Swedish Ice Hockey Association also developed what journalist Uffe Bodin says is known as the “hockey bible for defencemen,” a training manual specifically aimed at teaching players good routes for breakouts and outlet passes.
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The Swedish hockey federation was kind enough to pass along a copy of the defenceman's bible a couple weeks ago. I obviously can't read Swedish, but the few passages that I translated online were pretty interesting, especially when paired with some of the diagrams.
“Overview of the modern defenceman's attack actions” reads the headline in this section of the manual. Note the diagram features the word anfall — or attack — in capital letters on the far glass.
“The diagram shows offensive technical skills performed by the Swedish defencemen during the 2006 Olympics,” it explains. “Overall it describes 30 situations where different variations of these skills are used. By training our young Swedish defenders in these skills, we can prepare them for the challenges they will face.”
If it looks like something out of a science textbook, that's because it should. Using more scholastic methods to teach hockey has become the norm in Sweden. They did it first with goaltenders and now have implemented similar systems for every position in the game.
Some Swedish coaches now have considerable educational background, as teaching hockey is tied in with teaching in a more general sense. Pedagogy has become key.
“(Sweden's success has) always been about the education and having Nick Lidstrom as a role model,” Bodin said.
“They must be good at handling the puck,” Johansson explained of the philosophy being preached to defencemen in Sweden. “That’s something that’s very difficult when you work with juniors, as I do, because they’re afraid to make a mistake. But we let them do it.
“(We want) good skaters who are good with the puck. They’ve got to be good at defending, of course, but they’ve got to set up the play very quickly and have good hockey sense.”
Which relates back to Borgman learning not to clear the puck. And HV71 dominating Sweden's top league last season.
