Reminder on terminology from the previous parts:

Fakes: You know this one. A fake is a movement that simulates an action that a player may make in order to gain an advantage over another player and thus over the other team.

Non-committal attacks: These are motions that finish in an either/or scenario. The acting player pays attention to how the opponent responds to an action and will either continue with the action if they feel the responding player hasn't properly countered the motion or treat that first motion as a fake and go back the other way if the responding player has matched the initial action. In other words, the acting player attacks, but does not commit to following through with the attack.

Takes (attacks): Takes are genuine attempts to gain an advantage by fully committing to an action right from the initiation of motion.

Let's not start with puck protection, but instead work our way there. In the early 2010s, when the Blackhawks had their recent glory days, Patrick Kane put some cold water on Minnesota Wild fans' night at the Xcel Energy Center when he ended a game with one of the most overwhelming shootout moves ever used. Really, this was not one move. He may have handled the puck close to twenty times between the top of the circles and the net as he came in. Of those, the goalie (Nick Backstrom) may have perceived as many as ten actions that he had to honor as a threat. When Kane finished the play, Backstrom had completely abandoned any line of sight between the puck and the net, leaving zero challenge for Kane to end the game.

Here is a YouTube clip of that sequence:  https://youtu.be/jCFLtBV8Mdg

I would argue that this sequence was filled with non-committal attacks. I don't know what was in Kane's head during that move, but I suspect that if at any time in the sequence Backstrom wound up out of position far enough that Kane felt he had something like an 80% chance to sneak the puck past him with a quick snapshot he would have taken it. That sounds obvious, but remember it still depends on Kane paying attention primarily to Backstrom while making all of those moves that very few people in the world can do. Anyway, if he was probing for opportunities and not just executing a pre-programmed plan, then it was indeed non-committal attacks and a boatload of them.

Let's come back to Patrick Kane in a moment. 

How do big guys (mostly) protect the puck? Most big guys keep it simple when protecting the puck. They have advantages in range (mostly from stick length), strength, and weight in many cases against NHL defensemen. In cases where big forwards are protecting the puck against NHL defensemen and don't have outright advantages in those areas, it is at least a fair match up. This allows them to position the puck away from the defender and then "lean on them." It is not actually as simple as that, but big guys can place a heavy reliance on just that and be reasonably successful.

Little guys are usually at a disadvantage in all three categories compared to the defender. So, should they even bother trying to protect the puck in a battle situation, or should they just try to earn time and space with evasive skating? This is where Patrick Kane comes back in the picture. Kane is a little guy by NHL standards, and yet he is among the best puck protectors in the game. How does he pull this off?

I submit that he does it in the same way that he owned Backstrom on that shootout goal. He throws a massive number of non-committal attacks at the defender. We can already imagine that this is a good way to eventually beat the defender because if any one of these actions finds the defender out of position Kane can capitalize. But, I am saying it is a way to achieve sustained puck protection as well. How and why?

Because if the defender spends all his time trying to react but not overreact to non-committal attacks, they cannot take action (typically, by physically neutralizing Kane's body) to separate Kane from the puck. By always being a threat to beat the defender, the defender is always trying to honor their top priority, staying between Kane and the net. Kane gives them no time for their second priority - trying to separate him from the puck. They call this giving "respect," and at the NHL level, you see this sometimes resulting in the pace of play actually being slightly slower than in the AHL where the super dangerous players are usually absent, having moved up to the NHL.

Like other elite NHL offensive threats, since Kane is that dangerous, they are willing to give a bit more time and space in order to ensure they don't give him access to dangerous territory.

This sequence is a question of risk. If you are facing a defender and seek the territory behind them, you may (likely will) need to take on some risk of losing puck possession in order to gain that territory. However, if you have gained that territory and kept the puck, should you take on more risk?

Eventually, you may have to. In a simple case, you are all alone against a goalie, and if the goalie is in position, how would you expect to gain an advantage over them? The old "any shot is a good shot" mindset may indicate that you don't need to take on more risk, but simply take a quality shot. That certainly is not the strategy I would advocate for on a breakaway, and you don't see such a straightforward approach very often on breakaways at high levels either (though you certainly will see it sometimes, but I would argue, in almost all cases, at least some deception is employed).

However, I would like to focus not on the risk-taking that may be necessary against the goalie, but instead on what should be done with respect to the defender immediately after gaining the territorial advantage. Once the advantage is gained, that is a time to minimize risk. Keep it simple and carry the puck roughly along the open path to the net.

There are many situations like this in hockey. The general sequence is:

1. Find your team with possession of the puck but without a numbers advantage over the defending team and with the defenders in a good position to cut off your team's paths to the net.
2. Take on some risk by trying to beat an opponent one-on-one or by trying a pass to the interior of the defensive configuration.
3. The risk works, and now you find yourselves with a numbers advantage as you approach their net.
4. Keep the risk low during this phase and find the right time to attack.
5. To get a quality shot on net, make a relatively straightforward, minimal risk play involving mostly actions to the outside of the relevant defenders (defenders with a numbers disadvantage must prioritize the area immediately in front of the net, so plays on their perimeter are usually low-risk in these situations).
6. Alternatively, to get a high-quality scoring chance, risk loss of possession by bringing the puck into the heavily defended low slot (by pass or puckhandling move) and attack from there.

The six steps above are seen from a team level, but analogous steps are all present in situations like the one-on-one type scenario we had been considering. The strategies discussed where risk is kept low are mostly "taking what the game gives you." You hear a lot about that in sports. When the game is giving you the chance to gain advantages with minimal risk, simple, straightforward plays that "take" that advantage are indeed the best bet. It's when the defense takes these away that fakes and non-committal attacks become very important.

Non-committal attacks are open-ended and involve reading the other player, so they are the trickiest type of move to pull off.

This idea of reading the other player is the key differentiator when considering non-committal attacks. As with any movement skill, when we first learn a puckhandling fake pattern, for example, we place all of our attention on it (assuming we aren't distracted). Oftentimes, when first starting to get a handle on it, the pattern becomes ingrained as an all-or-nothing whole. This is to say that it can't easily be interrupted or adjusted mid-movement. We see this happen to some players when they put a move on a goalie. Often, in the end, if they were to use patience to get the puck out around the pad or simply put the puck upstairs over the pad, they have an easy goal. But players who have an all-or-nothing pattern wind up stuffing the puck into the goalie's pad because they are not yet sophisticated enough to adjust the pattern mid-stream.

And, beyond this, that still doesn't consider the challenge of executing a move while focusing on the reaction of the opponent. In order to make this attention to the reactions of the opponent valuable, you do need to be able to adjust mid-stream in order to take advantage of what you see from them. If you can't adjust, why gauge their reaction? So, we see that non-committal attacks are more challenging to execute by a few significant leaps (1. Adjusting mid-stream and 2. Paying attention to the opponent when deciding to do so).

This puts non-committal attacks last on the list of abilities that players acquire. What is first on the list? Well, fakes are simulations of straightforward attempts to take an advantage, so one would expect that they would be more complicated than the straightforward motions they are simulating. That is how I see it.

So, players start out (after they have gained some basic skating and puckhandling ability) mostly able to execute straightforward deception-free actions. After that, they pick up fake patterns. I suspect that next, they get enough experience to interrupt and adjust moves as needed. Finally, they will learn to apply moves with the intention of deciding whether or not to interrupt or adjust based on what they see after they start.

At the highest levels of the game, we should see a lot of non-committal attacks, and I believe that to be the case. And that is definitely what we see when we say that a player "has great patience." First, non-committal attacks allow patience to work by keeping the opponent off balance and thereby earning more time and space for the attacker. Second, they stay aware during all of these moves and can execute the action at the most opportune moment.

However, the highest levels of the game are also where the pace is most ferocious (aside from the "giving respect" phenomenon mentioned earlier). If one is overwhelmed by pace, they are at or near "cognitive overload." When this is the case, one can't choose where to place their attention, and non-committal attacks are devalued. It is the true masters who can do it at those levels.