Teams waste the free man on a delayed penalty

Six skaters, an empty net that cannot be scored on until you touch the puck, and most benches do nothing with it.

A delayed penalty is the only risk-free power play in sport and it is played like a fire drill.

The arm goes up. The goalie sprints for the bench. An extra forward jumps on. And then, almost always, the team on the puck settles into a slow perimeter cycle, passes it around the outside a few times, and waits for somebody to shoot into a crowd so the whistle can blow and the actual power play can begin.

Think about what has been given away there. For those few seconds the defending team cannot score. They cannot even try, because the moment any of them touches the puck the play stops. That means every defensive concern a team normally carries, the pinch that might go wrong, the low forward who should be covering the back door, the point man who has to stay honest, is suspended. You have six attackers against five defenders who are playing pure defence with no counter-attack behind it.

That is a better situation than the power play you are about to get. On the power play they can clear it, they can ice it, they can go short-handed and score. Here they cannot do any of it.

So why the perimeter passing? Partly nerves, partly because coaches understandably do not want a giveaway that leads to a lucky bounce into the empty net, which happens and looks ridiculous and gets replayed for a week. But the actual risk is one specific event: a puck that goes off a defender's stick and rolls the length of the ice untouched. That is a small set of plays, and it is avoidable by not blindly rimming the puck around the wall.

Everything else is free. Walk the puck to the net. Put a body on the goal line. Take the low percentage shot from the slot rather than the point, because a rebound cannot hurt you.

I would have a set play for this, the same way teams have set plays for an offensive zone draw. Two seconds of designed movement is worth more here than anywhere else on the ice, because the defence has no threat to respect.

Most benches treat these seconds as dead time before the real thing. They are the real thing.