The Pass Before The Pass

Two goals into a Wild game and the whole building starts leaning. Linemates quit shooting and start feeding him. Up in the cheap seats, a few thousand hats get loosened at the brim.

The hat trick has gravity. It also mostly doesn’t happen. (I’d have sworn two goals almost always turns into three. In the season Gretzky scored 87, he had two or more in 24 games and found the third in 10 of them. The hats stayed on more nights than they came off.)

Watch the shifts instead of the scoreboard. The guy sitting on two has also threaded a couple of clean passes through traffic and finished a hit that changed who wanted to go into the corner next. Each one greases the next. Two good passes and the third leaves his stick before he’s thought about it.

Hockey is one of the few sports that writes some of this down. A goal can carry two assists, so the scoresheet credits the pass before the pass. Basketball liked the idea enough to steal the name. Over there, that pass is a hockey assist.

A good coach lives in that second assist.

They catch you on the way to the bench and name the small thing. That pass to the weak side. Do it again. The scoreboard announces the goals on its own. Nobody announces the shift that made them possible.

Marketing runs on hat tricks. The launch, the campaign that pops.

The game gets decided somewhere quieter: a brief that finally made sense, a subject line that landed, a rep who used your one-pager without being asked twice. None of those get hats. They’re gone by Thursday…

If the person above you isn’t calling those out, sign a free agent coach. My AI is already set up to challenge my thinking before it answers me. The same tool can be told to catch the passes, daily instead of at the Friday readout, and it sits in more of your threads than any boss could.

Make it stingy, though. A coach who cheers every shift is just a fan with a whistle. Ask it for the one specific thing you did today that makes tomorrow easier, and make it tell you why.

Then take the harder shift yourself. Somebody on your team made a pass this week that never hit the scoresheet. You can still be the official scorer.

Stay Positive & Keep Your Hat On, Celebrate The Pass Before The Pass