Think about the characteristics of the hockey players that you love to watch. Do you love to watch Alex Ovechkin? You are probably a fan of the explosive power of a one-timer. You probably also enjoy his fast release and deceptive shot on the rush. Do you love to watch Patrick Kane? His fast, smooth hands and quickness probably stand out to you. Or maybe the fact that such a small player can be so effective at puck protection. Do you love McDavid’s speed? Maybe you like the punishing hits and a general mean imposition of will by (insert your favorite physical defenseman here).

That is a pretty good list of the common traits that fans celebrate in players. What’s that you say? How about the passing wizardry of Mikael Grandlund or vintage Sedin twins? How about the mesmerizing two-way play that Pavel Datsyuk displayed for 14 NHL seasons? Indeed, these are great examples of traits that a more seasoned hockey fan should love.

However, I have not yet mentioned the one trait to rule them all. Close followers of my articles may see the trait I have in mind coming because it fits into an ongoing theme. In this article, I am going to make a bolder claim about it than I have made in the past and then attempt to shed light on why I believe it.

So, here it is...  Success in hockey goes to those who react faster than opponents. One caveat:  This is not always true. Sometimes significant advantages in the other areas (ones I mentioned above and others) can shift the balance. But, by far, more often than not, the faster reactor wins.

This probably doesn’t seem super bold. So, let me push it a little further. What I am saying is that if you took all of the advantages I mentioned above in some combination (and these are very much some of the things that stand out to scouts and analysts as they predict and project player and team success) and pitted them against the advantage of being a faster reactor, the faster reactor will win in most cases.

There are limits to this claim… who’s to say how big the advantages we are talking about are? How do you compare an advantage in the deceptiveness of a shooter to an advantage in reaction time? With our methods of analysis today, this is basically impossible. So, I’ll put it this way, to counterbalance a fairly small disadvantage in reaction time a player needs either of a combination of advantages in other areas or quite a large advantage in any one other area.

Let’s look at a silly example to see why. Let’s say that a player read this article and decided to sacrifice the quality of her reactions in order to double their reaction speed. Let’s pretend that this makes some sense because reactions involve deciding what to do and if you give yourself less time to decide you’ll make worse decisions. Of course, this isn’t true in hockey because we have to play the game with reactions and not conscious decisions (for the most part). Still, players who are forced to hurry do tend to make worse decisions.

Regardless, the idea is that decisions will be worse due to making them happen twice as fast. To keep things simple, let's assume that the slower opponent has one reaction per second and the faster player makes two reactions per second (in case it isn’t clear, they are reacting to each other’s actions). Now consider a one-on-one scenario, maybe a play coming out of the corner or one on a rush. Now imagine, in the first action, the fast reacting player does exactly the opposite of the right play and the other player reacts to this. The poor quality of that first action becomes obvious half a second later and the faster-reacting player uses their second action to correct and move to make the right play, meanwhile, the other player is still reacting to that first action.

Now, where are we after a full second? The fast reacting player is basically doing as well as they would have been if they were slow reacting but had might the right decision right away. Maybe they are doing a little worse because their first action took them out of position, but maybe not because the other player spent that whole second reacting to the first action and not the faster player’s correction. The result is that the faster-reacting player is doing just as well as if they had made a perfect decision right away but didn’t have a second action in the first second… And this assumes the worst case scenario… that their first action was as bad as it could be!

If the faster-reacting player is making even reasonably good decisions, they very quickly get into a much better position than the slower opponent.

Let’s bring this back to the real world.  In the real world, there do exist players who react twice as fast as others. But they are never competing against one another because, for example, the fast one is an NHL player and the other is a mite or maybe a lesser experienced squirt (you may think that it is a higher level player that would react half as fast as an NHLer, but, if so, I think you don’t appreciate how huge a difference reacting half as fast as somebody else is).

At the high levels of the game, the difference in game-scenario reaction time is probably 10% at most and in most cases, a lot less. This is still a great advantage. The faster-reacting player is operating with better-updated information a higher percentage of the time and they are more often making intentional changes to their plan in response to the flow of the game. Except in the case of the rare mistake, intentional changes are ones that are better for that player’s team.

A faster-reacting opponent “seems” to know where you are going before you do, in part because they are reacting faster and in part, because their more frequently updated plans can put you into a position where you become more predictable.

Faster reacting players both leverage these advantages and correct for disadvantages better than slower ones. The difference is huge!

Now, If you believe my argument, then you may be asking, why are they spending all of this time working on skill? Why does the NHL select such skilled players and not drag racers from the NHRA event in Brainerd each summer?

I will get into that in part 2, but let’s touch on it now. Hockey coaches, skill instructors, and scouts are not wrong to promote skill for two reasons. First, as we have said, high skill is still advantageous.  I am just saying it is not as advantageous as fast reactions. But, second, and more importantly, consider if you have ever seen somebody who is not a proficient skater react fast on ice skates. I guess I have, but let's just say panicked flailing of the arms in the midst of a fall isn’t the type of “fast reaction” that helps one’s team win a hockey game. It is hard to quickly react in a strategically advantageous way when you have to concentrate on the details of how to move your body. This is all to say that well-developed skill and fast reactions go hand in hand.