{"id":567584,"date":"2026-04-06T09:07:20","date_gmt":"2026-04-06T09:07:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/567584\/"},"modified":"2026-04-06T09:07:20","modified_gmt":"2026-04-06T09:07:20","slug":"meet-the-ivy-league-student-who-wants-to-quantify-forechecking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/567584\/","title":{"rendered":"Meet the Ivy League student who wants to quantify forechecking"},"content":{"rendered":"

Shortly after speaking to a crowd of 300 people, Trey Elder<\/a> was a popular guy.<\/p>\n

Elder was one of four presenters during the HALO conference and meetings Tuesday at Ball Arena<\/a>. Hosted by Arik Parnass, who leads the Colorado Avalanche analytics department, the conference was the largest collection of NHL analytics staffers the league has ever seen. Each of the presentations was a finalist for the conference\u2019s hackathon competition.<\/p>\n

A graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, Elder gave a presentation on a metric to better define forechecking success called PRESS (puck recovery and exit suppression score). Shortly after Elder\u2019s presentation, there were several attendees who wanted to speak further with him on the topic.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s been great,\u201d Elder said. \u201cI\u2019ve never presented at a conference before, let alone in front of like, real NHL people. It was very cool. I was a little nervous, like I think everyone would be, but I felt very prepared, so I feel like I did an OK job.<\/p>\n

\u201cI tend to think that no one is going to solve hockey, or come up with a singular thing that is like, \u2018This is how you win more games,\u2019 or \u2018this is how you score more goals.\u2019 I\u2019m very interested in the aspects of the game that are somethings like the game within the game. With forechecking, the object isn\u2019t to score a goal, it\u2019s to get the puck back. That\u2019s an aspect of the game that feels like it could be optimized in some way.\u201d<\/p>\n

Elder grew up in Northern Virginia, rooting for the Washington Capitals. His goal after school is to some day work for an NHL team.<\/p>\n

As part of the hackathon competition, all of the contestants were given the same set of data \u2014 a batch of AHL games from two seasons ago \u2014 to work with. Elder and his partner, Jonathan Pipping, went through about 28,000 forechecks, and developed a model for league-average success rates in two components of forechecking.<\/p>\n

They were then able to score players against that average. One member of an NHL team\u2019s analytics staff said the findings from Elder and Pipping lined up pretty closely with what his club\u2019s research into forechecking success has found.<\/p>\n

Colorado Avalanche forward Joel Kiviranta<\/a> didn\u2019t spend much time with the Colorado Eagles in the AHL, but he was there during the timeframe of this set of games. He also scored as one of the top-five forecheckers in Elder\u2019s metric.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m sure there are groups that are collecting that data and analyzing it however they want to analyze it,\u201d Avs forward Logan O\u2019Connor said. \u201cAs the game evolves, analytics have obviously become a huge part of sports in general, and especially with hockey. It would definitely be fascinating to see the tendencies and player-to-player matchups, how teams do it differently, and what the success is, where the puck is, where the player is, and whatnot.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think at some point analytics can become overwhelming, because hockey is so dynamic. Baseball analytics are a very easy, set number of things that they look at, whereas hockey is so fluid that I think it can definitely get challenging. I\u2019m sure those guys are brilliant for a reason. I\u2019m sure they have ways around it.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Avs are one of the most aggressive forechecking teams in the NHL. It\u2019s the the fuel for their offensive engine. Colorado wants the game played at a frenetic pace, and dialing up the pressure far away from their own goaltender when the Avs don\u2019t have the puck often allows them to create turnovers and continued offensive threats.<\/p>\n

NHL teams have been trying to identify the best forecheckers for as long as there has been scouting. Avs coach Jared Bednar has said how his team forechecks is one of the first indicators he looks at to see if his team came ready to work in a particular game.<\/p>\n

\u201cI mean, I would love it,\u201d Parker Kelly said of a standardized forechecking metic. \u201cAs a forechecking guy, yeah. I feel like there\u2019s got to be forechecking stats out there already. Maybe it\u2019s not a league-wide set, but we have our own in here and that\u2019s a big stat we do look at.<\/p>\n

\u201cI feel like that\u2019s kind of a staple of our game. When our forecheck is humming, it\u2019s usually a good indicator of our legs. We\u2019re hunting the puck. We\u2019re making good decisions. I\u2019d love to sit down and go through all of those types of stats. I find them really interesting.\u201d<\/p>\n

It takes hard work to forecheck, but there\u2019s more to it than a player just skating around and throwing his body around to be an effective forechecker at the highest levels. There is skill and craft involved. Most of the best forecheckers don\u2019t rely on big hits.<\/p>\n

Guys like Kelly, O\u2019Connor and Kiviranta are well-versed in the other team\u2019s plan to get the puck out of danger. There are times when the best forechecks don\u2019t involve hitting at all, but rushing a defenseman into making a poor decision.<\/p>\n

As Elder noted in his presentation, the forechecker who creates the original turnover often never touches the puck and therefore never gets any credit in a traditional box score. Elder\u2019s model hopes to define better credit for players at each level of a forechecking system.<\/p>\n

One of the attendees at the HALO conference was Andrew Cogliano, special assistant to Avalanche general manager Chris MacFarland. Cogliano was one of the league\u2019s most respected forecheckers for years. It\u2019s not hard to imagine a world where, with more defined and readily available data like Elder\u2019s PRESS metic on who the best forecheckers are, a player like Cogliano being an even more valuable commodity.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think with the skill of it, in regard to things like body position, angling, stick position, that\u2019s something that would be hard to put a metric on,\u201d O\u2019Connor said. \u201cIt is a bit more challenging, but as you average things out over a season or a career, you could definitely see tendencies and who specializes in it, and who can make a career out of doing that, for sure.\u201d<\/p>\n

Want more Avalanche news? Sign up for the Avalanche Insider to get all our NHL analysis.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Shortly after speaking to a crowd of 300 people, Trey Elder was a popular guy. Elder was one…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":567585,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[66],"tags":[250727,1222,17718,31142,1223,9873,47314,14689,2558,64730,65879,385,211153,99],"class_list":{"0":"post-567584","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nhl","8":"tag-andrew-cogliano","9":"tag-avalanche","10":"tag-ball-arena","11":"tag-chris-macfarland","12":"tag-colorado-avalanche","13":"tag-colorado-eagles","14":"tag-jared-bednar","15":"tag-joel-kiviranta","16":"tag-latest-headlines","17":"tag-logan-oconnor","18":"tag-more-avalanche-news","19":"tag-nhl","20":"tag-parker-kelly","21":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/567584","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=567584"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/567584\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/567585"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=567584"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=567584"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=567584"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}