DeBrincat's Search for Scoring

"It's a good question.  There's a lot that goes into it," Alex DeBrincat tells The Hockey News, from his locker Monday morning.  I had asked the Farmington Hills-born winger about the challenge of simply getting shots off, setting aside scoring, in an NHL game.  "Obviously, you're gonna have some open spots, but you still have to beat a goalie...Everyone thinks if you get a shot in tight, you're supposed to score, but goalies are good...I think there's probably a lot of different ways you could think about it.  I think fans and stuff want more shots, but there's good players on the other end that are trying to stop you from doing that, so it's not always as easy as it looks...Even on a breakaway, as a player, you're like 'Oh I should've scored on that breakaway,' but there's pretty good goalies in the league that should stop it too."

14 games into his second season in Detroit, DeBrincat is second on the Red Wings in both goals (six) and shots (30).  It's an encouraging start to the year, setting him off on a 35-goal pace, after his 27 markers in his debut season back in his hometown fell short of expectations. Throughout his career, not unlike a lot of high-level snipers, DeBrincat's goals have tended to come in bursts: scorching stretches and dry spells alternating.  I asked DeBrincat about how he evaluates his game.  Is it simply a matter of maintaining a steady flow of chances, or are some shots better than others?

"I don't think it's about shot number. I think it's definitely quality," DeBrincat replies.  "For me personally, I'm most successful when I think shot first, so that comes into play, but I'm not thinking about shooting percentage. I'm not gonna shy away from a shot because I want my shooting percentage to go up. There's a lot of things analytically that you're not thinking about in the game. I think that's one of them. [I'm] trying to create the best chances for myself and the team, and it's not always, 'Oh if I had five shots, that's a good night.' That's not necessarily how it goes. You can come away from a game with one or even zero shots and still feel good about your game, still feel like you've created chances. I think that's a lot of it: chances for versus chances against.

"You always wanna with that line battle, whoever you're up against that night, or if it's rolling, it doesn't matter: You always wanna be on the positive there, so I think that's more important than shot total or shooting percentage. I saw Brady Tkachuk had 12 shots the other night. I think he ended up scoring, maybe one or two [This was in the Senators' 3-2 win over the Bruins last Friday, and Tkachuk indeed had one goal on a whopping 12 shots]. Still, you take 12 shots, you're shooting percentage might not be great, but it means he was all over the puck, he was having a good game. But to the other point, maybe all of those weren't quality shots, so who knows?"

DeBrincat also points out that the difficulty of finding chances in the NHL means you want to be sure to take advantage of the good ones when you do find them.  When I ask whether something like a backdoor play off the rush that just misses helps show the limits of using shots to evaluate success in that it's a quality look that doesn't produce a shot on net, he replies, "Those are some that you really wanna capitalize on. Those chances don't always come. It's not easy in this league to get those chances, so when they're there, you definitely wanna connect and make sure it's in the net. There's a lot of different things you can evaluate your game on, and one of them is how many chances you're getting, but if you're getting so many chances and not scoring, consistently you're not scoring, then there's something wrong."

All the while, as DeBrincat pointed out himself, there are lots of ways to evaluate whether a given outing was successful, and one area where Red Wings coach Derek Lalonde has consistently praised DeBrincat is the way his game away from the puck has grown.  In his final season in Ottawa, he was a -31; in his first season in Detroit, he was a +1; whatever the limits of plus/minus as a statistic, it's a stark contrast.

Lalonde sees a newfound pride in DeBrincat's off-puck play that manifests in "wall play, getting above on plays, [and] winning battles."  "Just off the top of my head, we're asking our team to compete, have some attitude, a little extra effort, and he forechecks an icing call that would've been an icing, D zone face-off, when we need a full change," Lalonde recalls last week, referring back to Detroit's Nov. 2 win over the Buffalo Sabres.  "That's a battle. He tracks hard and gets a strip of a puck and all of a sudden he sets [Patrick] Kane up on a back-door two-on-one. I think he's just taken a lot of pride in those type of things. Offensive guys, you want them to have a little instincts on the way they lean at times, but not cheat. And I think he's just been a little more responsible in how he anticipates some plays. I think it helps us along."

Of course, through the hot stretches and the frosty ones, DeBrincat takes pleasure in the fact that in playing for the Red Wings, he is living out a boyhood dream in the company of his family.  "It's been really fun," he says, of getting to bring his professional career back to his hometown.  "Obviously a dream come true with how everything's played out.  I think there's a lot of positives.  Having family close by is great.  Being here and playing for the Red Wings—as a kid, you dream about it all the time, and now it's just life.  So it's very exciting, and you've gotta be grateful for it every day.  Not everyone gets the chance to live out their childhood dream and play for the team they rooted for growing up."

It appears no member of the DeBrincat family has enjoyed the move to Detroit quite like his elder son Archie, who has become something of a social media sensation for his cameos in social media clips the Red Wings put out from warm-ups.  "He loves it," DeBrincat reports.  "It's fun.  He gets to see his grandparents every night.  Likes hockey a lot."

DeBrincat's younger son Maverick—born last February, just after his father played in the All-Star Game in Toronto—doesn't yet come out to as many games as his older brother and perhaps isn't quite old enough to fully grasp his surroundings, but dad has no doubt that's coming, saying with a grin, "I think he's still too young to really know what's going on, so he's kind of in the background, not quite a co-star yet, but he'll get there one day."

Related: Have the Red Wings Found the Right Fit for Patrick Kane?

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