Can a team lose the neutral zone and still drive possession in the other zones to win the possession battle? Todd McLellan thinks so.
These days, when we talk about possession, we’re typically talking about a player’s corsi/fenwick/shot numbers overall, or we break them down into shots for and against. The thing about doing this is that while it gives you a decent picture of what overall is happening while a player or team is on the ice, it doesn’t really give you a specific picture – does a player have a good corsi because he’s an elite offensive zone player or is it his performance in neutral and defensive zone causing this? Even separating into shots for and against doesn’t narrow this down – for instance, a player can suppress shots by being in the neutral (or hell, even offensive zones), which doesn’t say anything about him necessarily in the defensive zone.
Hockey Graphs 