Islanders and Rangers are increasingly using tablets during games. Sometimes it can be too much.

Mika Zibanejad can’t remember the exact words former Rangers teammate Chris Kreider barked at him as he simultaneously grabbed the iPad from his buddy’s hands and chucked it behind them but the message was clear:

“Stop. Play the game.”

Newsday spoke to players and coaches around the NHL about the growing use of technology during games and the wide-ranging availability of analytics to inform decisions, and the consensus was while all the information can serve a purpose, it also can be overwhelming.

Sometimes, players want to trust their instincts on the ice. Or to make sure their teammates trust their game.

The Zibanejad-Kreider interaction during Game 6 of the Rangers’ first-round series against the Penguins in 2022 immediately went viral. Zibanejad had just hit a post on a breakaway and Kreider’s actions yanked him out of his own head and back into the match. Both went on to score two goals – Zibanejad also added two assists – as the Rangers forced Game 7 and ultimately advanced.

“I was just frustrated and I wanted to go back and look at it,” Zibanejad told Newsday. “I had Kreids sitting next to me and he’s like, ‘What are you doing?’ He took it and obviously threw it. Slammed it. Like, stop. At certain times, you overanalyze things.”

It's a Catch-22

Tablets are readily available on the bench for players and coaches to review plays. Coaches can use it to point out in-game adjustments, be it five-on-five or on special teams. Players can review opponent tendencies and ways of attacking or defending.

But, sometimes, the technology serves to keep players wallowing in their mistake. And one of the most common things a coach will say is that hockey is a game of mistakes.

“I feel like we kind of use it too much in a sense,” Senators center Shane Pinto of Franklin Square told Newsday. “Hockey is such an instinct kind of game. It’s so fast out there so you have to process things. I think it kind of stinks when maybe it can ruin your game when you’re looking at it and you kind of dwell on a play a little bit. But it’s also good for seeing in-game adjustments so it’s kind of a Catch-22. So it’s just how you use them.”

“Over time, it seems like the urgency or the need to review something, you’re looking for that instant gratification,” Ducks coach Joel Quenneville, behind his fifth NHL bench in a 27-season career that includes three Stanley Cup championships with Chicago, told Newsday.

Islanders center Brayden Schenn, 35, almost rolled his eyes when the subject was raised with him and said he does notice a difference in the use of tablets on the bench between veterans and younger players, with the latter group using it more.

“I’m not an iPad guy,” Schenn told Newsday. “I think there’s a certain time and place, power play, some special teams. But I think if you get a chance and you don’t score on your chance and you go back and look at it and you’re like, ‘Oh, I didn’t score.’ With the iPads, if you look at them too much, you lose the feel of the game. You lose talking to your linemates, talking to your teammates. I think you’re going to get more out of what other people around you are seeing with communication that way rather than looking down at a screen.”

Islanders defenseman Matthew Schaefer, at 19, certainly qualifies as a younger player.

He said first having access to tablets in the junior Ontario Hockey League was an eye-opening experience because of that immediacy of knowledge.

But now that Schaefer, last season’s unanimous winner of the Calder Trophy as the rookie of the year, is in the NHL, he doesn’t want to rely on the technology to inform his play.

“I feel like there’s a balance,” Schaefer told Newsday. “I feel like you shouldn’t use it all the time. I honestly don’t really use it that much unless [assistant coach Bob Boughner], our defensive coach, is trying to show us something. At the end of the day it might just be scenarios of what I could have done a little better. But it’s so quick that you’ve just kind of got to shut off your mind and it’s a new shift. There’s a balance on using it or not.”

Analytics vs. eye test

The use of in-game technology goes hand-in-hand with the proliferation of analytics in hockey, the same as in any other professional sport. NHL teams have ever-increasing staffs devoted to collecting advanced data, analyzing the trends and disseminating and explaining the information to the coaches and staff.

“This is the world that these players have grown up in and there’s an expectation of that instant information,” Islanders coach Pete DeBoer said. “A lot of times, there’s a reliance on that in order to make them feel good to get out for the next shift.”

The balance for coaches and players is understanding that analytical information while also applying the eye test and trusting in that as well.

“It has a place,” Schenn said. “Analytics can’t measure character, heart, teammates, how bad they want to win. There’s a lot of stuff where analytics don’t measure what type of player guys are. They measure guys with the puck, without the puck.”

“Give me all the information,” Quenneville said. “I’ll take whatever, absorb it knowing that you can get information to make any story look positive or negative. There’s some good information out there. How you apply it is just one more criteria that you can evaluate.”

Added Rangers coach Mike Sullivan, “Context is so, so important when you look at some of these numbers. I think it's very difficult – and I think it's dangerous, quite honestly – when people try to interpret numbers in the absence of the context.”

Evolving coaches

Like Quenneville and Sullivan, DeBoer is a veteran NHL coach – this is his sixth stop in 19 seasons – who has watched as the use of information and technology has grown exponentially and has had to grow as a coach along with that pace.

DeBoer said seeing how Islanders general manager Mathieu Darche had bolstered the analytics’ department was a factor in him accepting the job with four games remaining last season.

Newsday asked DeBoer whether he’s in the same place with analytics that he was when he first stepped behind an NHL bench with the Panthers in 2008 at the age of 40.

“No, I’m not in the same place,” he said. “It’s become a very important part of what we do. It’s a great question and it’s not an easy answer. From a coaching perspective, team play, a lot of times, what it does is it confirms the eye test. What you’re feeling or what you think you’re seeing. That’s comforting to be able to look at some hard data and go, ‘OK, that’s what I thought I saw.’ At the same time, there will be a couple of things where you might not see that. What that does is it makes you dig deeper into something, ‘Why don’t I see that when I’m standing behind the bench? Why doesn’t it feel like that?’

“Where it has been most valuable for me has been with individual players, guys in a slump. The diving into, ‘Is he getting the puck in the right areas?’ compared to when he was scoring a year ago. ‘Are his puck touches the same?’ When you’re sitting down with individual players and when you’ve got answers for them and it’s backed by hard data like that, it’s much more impactful than a coach just telling a player, ‘Hey, I don’t think you’re getting to this spot enough.’”

In the end, it’s all about getting the maximum performance out of a player.

Which is why Zibanejad appreciated what Kreider did in destroying that iPad. Zibanejad went back to that moment when Kreider was traded to the Ducks in 2025, re-posting the clip on his social media as a testament to how close the two are.

“I was like, ‘Should I have a cheesy photo of us or just like a moment that kind of represents a little bit of our friendship?’ ” Zibanejad said. “That was perfect.”

Newsday's Colin Stephenson contributed to this report.