Roger Neilson Was Doing Modern Hockey Before Hockey Was Ready
Every once in a while, I come across an old hockey story and think, we really haven't changed as much as we think we have. Roger Neilson is one of those stories. Neilson was coaching NHL hockey decades before we started talking about analytics, tracking data, video coaches and studying every little tendency a team might have.
Yet a lot of what he was doing would look pretty familiar to a modern NHL coach. That might be the most interesting thing about him.
Captain Video was an odd duck in his day. Now, well, not so much.
Neilson became known as “Captain Video” because he was one of the first coaches to seriously use video to study hockey. At the time, that made him look a little strange. Today, we'd probably call it preparation.
He wasn't just watching games for entertainment. He was looking for patterns. How did an opponent break out of its own zone? What did a particular player tend to do in certain situations? Where were the opportunities? What was his own team doing well — and where was it getting into trouble? That sounds pretty ordinary now. It wasn't ordinary then.
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Neilson was one of the first head coaches to use full-time assistants.
And Neilson didn't stop with video. He used headsets to communicate with his assistants and was one of the first coaches to use full-time assistant coaches. He understood that coaching wasn't simply about standing behind the bench and yelling at players. He was trying to build a system for understanding the game.
That's where I think Neilson deserves more credit than he sometimes gets. Hockey has always had coaches who understood the game. But Neilson seemed particularly interested in why things happened.
Neilson studied the rules, too. Sometimes that got him into trouble.
He famously found ways to exploit quirks in the rulebook, and some of those exploits eventually helped lead to rule changes. You might look at that today and say he was being cute. I think he was doing something more important. He was testing the system.
And that is really what made Neilson different. He wasn't satisfied with simply accepting that hockey had always been played a certain way. He wanted to know whether there was a better way. That's basically the philosophy behind modern hockey analysis.
Today, teams have entire departments devoted to finding small advantages. Coaches have video analysts, data analysts and technology that can measure things Neilson could only observe with his own eyes. But the basic question hasn't changed.
Neilson wanted to understand the game a little better than other coaches.
Neilson was asking that question long before it became fashionable. Maybe “Captain Video” wasn't such a strange nickname after all. Maybe Roger Neilson was simply a modern hockey thinker who arrived a few decades too early.
Modern NHL coaching relies heavily on video and technology, and Neilson was an early pioneer of using video as a teaching and analytical tool. People who worked with him describe him as a premier innovator in hockey video.