Asunto: USA U-20 Team

We play Russia next. If we look at the numbers they are better then us but not by much. We will see how it goes. We will just look at one game at a time.

Very sad game we gave up 2 power play goals and a empty netter to loss 3-1.

PK failed again today. Lost 3-2. Our Offense was also flat did not score a regular goal but did get 2 power play goals.

That's too bad. At least the United States is still in 4th place and seems to match up well against Portugal and Bosnia and Herzegovina.

I played a lot of the team in the other division in friendly game and did will. It just seems we have a division that is really stack with the best team. Hope the Offense wakes up/

No Offense again today Plus Canada won in a shoot out some we are now playing to stay up in Division I.

One thing I noticed is that Americans managers dont' train a lot of shooting as other countries do.
we need to wake up and bump the shooting ratio of our players

Completely agree. Canucks has a nice article on the matter that was recently posted. Worth a read if you haven't already.

Shooting has definitely been a problem. Good defensemen with shooting in particular have been a rare luxury.

Our Shooting was as good as most teams. It was funny the only game I won I played on High all the games I lost I played on Very High. Our team out shot almost everyone and in one game we lost we out shot the other team 2 to 1. It just seem that they went to sleep for the tournament. I thought this was going to be the team to move us up not maybe down. Fun things just happen in this game at times. Will just keep plugging along.

What are the suggested ratios then? I'm trying to keep wingers at 80% of Offense, and centers at 50%. As for Dmen, it depends how good their shooting quality is for me to develop it.

ppm.powerplaymanager.com/...

That's the link to Canucks' article. I'd suggest giving it a read when you have some time, it's well worth it. To help you out, here's the last summary statement:

Everyone's results will be different but I think the general message will remain the same. Don't neglect training shooting. It is an easy thing to let slide but you can notice a difference if you invest the time into training it. If you don't have it already, I recommend getting a ProPack. For one, you're supporting the game we all love, but you'll also have autopractice at your disposal. You can set all your forwards to 10-8-5-5 and never have to worry about changing practices manually again.

Thanks for reading. Please, please, PLEASE, keep in mind the caveats associated with this publication. This is not meant to be an "80% is perfect!" statement, but rather "I wouldn't go below 70 or 80%" statement. Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoyed my little distraction from work I'm paid to do. Now, to watch my win totals drop due to sharing this information with my opponents.

There is also a very old article saying what shooting numbers convert to for shooting OR
(LW + RW)*.151 = WOR
C * .1616 = COR
(LD + RD) * .0688 = DOR

WOR + COR + DOR = A lines shoot value

Yeah, one of the things that shocks me is how low the shooting on our centers for the national teams is being trained. 2 of my top 3 points guys this season on my personal team were centers, and they were my goal leaders. I'll tell you right now their shooting isn't just 50% of offense.

It is probably a good strategy to train shooting for only defensemen that have a good shooting quality. The problem is that there are often no or very few elite defensemen with good shooting (though the depth, of offensive defensemen if not of defensemen overall, on the U18 team is actually pretty good this year).

Lance (18 years old) and Dupuis (17 years old) on the U18 team are both probably senior team caliber centers with amazing shooting. Even without the additional shooting, they are generally better than all of the other centers for their respective years.

A lot of the problem is that the depth in the United States is still low. There still aren't too many teams (though this is starting to change) who are capable of producing quality players also with quality shooting. There were only about 5-10 15 year olds from United States teams with over 500 OR, and maybe a handful of 400 OR to 500 OR 15 year olds with really good AVQ.