🔩 | The 5x 1:1 Defense of Kalmarsund - the Low-Event Maneuver

One way of trying to slow down a dangerous opponent, is to try to limit the amount of events in a game – meaning how much that actually happens in terms of shot attempts and scoring chances.

For this post in the Frankenstein series, we are looking deeper onto how Kalmarsund sometimes deploys a five times one-on-one defense system, to slow down good opponents.

In this case, we are looking back to an SSL game in the end of the regular season, in which Kalmarsund faced Falun at home. They played two lines playing zone defense, and then a third line, which was playing five times one-on-one while defending.

The line was made up by Erol, Hedstål, Hellgren, Lennartsson and Theorin. Many of these players having a histoy of playing a lot of one-on-one systems earlier in their careers.

They were mostly facing a third line of Dakhallah, Seiler, Inglander, Frisch and Wedberg, but also had some shifts against the Falun top line of Ruud, Lundmark and Johansson.

Numbers for all game phases

The line had 11 shifts during the game. There was a lot of special teams in this game, and coach David Gillek of Kalmarsund gave his top lines a couple of extra shifts in the end of the first and the second period, and shortened his bench rotating only his two top lines pretty early in the third period.

Here are the numbers from all game phases for the Kalmarsund line.

We see that they actually won their game within the game pretty handily, even though there were not a whole lot of scoring chances.

Now, let us look at only the parts of the game where this Kalmarsund line was defending zone entries and defending their own zone – meaning they were deploying the five times one-on-one system in all of these situations.

Here are the numbers.

No, it is not a typo from my side. These are the actual numbers.

No scoring chances, either way.

Two shots fired from Falun (and I am actually being generous with one of them, which you will see in the video analysis below), and no shots fired from Kalmarsund.

Talk about making the game a low-event affair, and if that was what they were looking for – they for sure succeeded in that. And I can only confirm, that this is what you typically get from a five times one-on-one system. It slows down the game, if not the line you are facing is a guns blazing team which likes to take their chances. I have done tests with Swiss youth national teams, where we have seen that a five times one-on-one can reduce the amount of shot attempts in a game with up to 50% at times.

How did it look on court?

Let us look at some game film, to see why it slows down the game so much.