A carry-in just waiting to be recorded by someone.

Okay so in our last post, we discussed why tracking the Neutral Zone is important.  We also briefly discussed what we track when tracking the neutral zone.  But in this post, I’m going to provide you with a detailed guide and the resources you will need to actually track the neutral zone yourself.

What You Need For Neutral Zone Tracking:

Neutral Zone tracking doesn’t require much.  At a minimum you only require:
1.  Access to NHL Games
2. Something to record Neutral Zone Entry #s (Usually a spreadsheet)
3. A place to compile your total #s (Usually another spreadsheet)

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Frans Nielsen is incredibly good in the neutral zone.  But How important is that really?  And how can we tell that’s the case to begin with?

A while back, Hockey-Graph’s own Matt Cane wrote the following tweet:

Related to what @Thats_Offside has said: Why should I care what a player’s zone entry rates are? Convince me, Twitter.

— Matt Cane (@Cane_Matt) November 27, 2015

Matt was referring to a statistic commonly found in “Neutral Zone Tracking,” which purports to measure the quality of individual and team play in the Neutral Zone.  Neutral Zone Tracking was pioneered by a bunch of guys at Broad Street Hockey (Eric Tulsky and Geoff Detweilier) back in 2011 and in the years since, a bunch of individuals have also began to do the same.  The work that’s been done on this area, on other sites as well as on this one suggests neutral zone tracking results in some extremely important data that we should be very interested in.

What is Neutral Zone Tracking:

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