Enrico Blasi: Becoming More Effective with Your D-Zone Transitions

This excellent hockey session builds on the defensive keys worked on during Coach Rico Blasi’s ‘Creating a Game-Ready Defense’ session and shifts focus to the defensive unit supporting the transition to offense. As in his other video sessions, Blasi does an effective job setting the tone of the drill on a whiteboard before taking it to the ice for the majority of the drill; the multiple reps ‘on-ice’ give you the opportunity to digest his concepts. Learn some high intensity transition drills which you can immediately implement in your environment and be more prepared to run effective and efficient transitions for game day.

Defensive Discipline

The nine drills in this session reinforce having discipline in executing defensive concepts. The ‘breakout’ drills emphasize the importance of intelligent puck and player movement, while the ‘zone’ work focuses on winning battles, not over-committing to the puck at the risk of losing position, and desire to win battles. Coach Blasi shows you his ‘D Zone Funnel Drill’ in which the concepts of gap control, “don’t go fishing for the puck”, communication, and the importance of stick-on-stick defense are highlighted.

Effective Support of the Forwards in Transition

Coach Blasi works through a series of drills which involve the defense winning the puck back and being in a position to transition to offense. His session works on “winning the battles” inside the D-Zone and effectively starting a breakout. These drills isolate the role of the defense in the transition through all three zones and focus on being successful by paying attention to the details of both key defensive and offensive concepts.

Awareness and Compete

The execution of this training session supports the idea of “practice like you play”. Each of the nine drills in this session is run at game speed with a high level of compete. Coach Blasi is sure to inspire you to incorporate this attitude into your sessions, and provides a great set of drills to use as templates!

63 minutes. 2023.