The N.H.L.’s general managers will meet on Tuesday in Toronto to discuss the progress of the league’s expanded rule against hits to the head and boarding as well as the length of suspensions, among other topics. Curiously, the penalties have decreased from the preseason to the regular season.
But a newer agenda item will be what to do, if anything, about the bizarre tactics in the Philadelphia-Tampa Bay game last Wednesday, won by the visiting Lightning in overtime, 2-1.
The gamesmanship started in the opening minute and continued through more than a half-dozen episodes, bringing the action on the ice to a standstill.
When the Flyers had uncontested puck possession deep in their end, the Lightning backed away and fanned out in the middle of the rink, setting up a strict 1-3-1 defense.
One Lightning player stood just behind the Flyers’ blue line, three more lined up across the red line, and the fifth parked himself in his own zone. There they stood, nearly immobile, waiting for the Flyers to run a breakout play.
That is not unprecedented. But what the Flyers did was. They refused to challenge this passive defensive formation and did not move the puck forward. In response, the Lightning refused to break ranks to go after the puck.
The situation turned into a coaches’ stalemate between Tampa Bay’s Guy Boucher and Philadelphia’s Peter Laviolette. The Flyers on the bench taunted the Lightning players, calling them cowards for hanging back. Bloggers hit their DVRs, and within minutes, video clips were circulating.
Twice the referees whistled a halt to the stall and called for face-offs, the Flyers guilty of not trying to advance the puck. The other times, the Flyers finally tried breaking through or the Lightning finally swooped forward.
The standoffs totaled about four minutes of playing time, the longest being 35 seconds. But the game’s lasting image was more freeze than flow.
Neutral-zone trapping tactics are hardly new. They reached their nadir in the prelockout N.H.L. beginning in the mid-1990s. But rule changes coming out of the 2004-5 lockout rendered them far less effective than they were when teams like the Devils and the Dallas Stars were N.H.L. powers.
Ken Hitchcock, who coached those Stars, acknowledged the old tactics last week when he was hired to coach St. Louis. He called his trapping 1999 Stanley Cup team “kind of slow” and likened it to “an old dog” that waited for opponents’ mistakes, then pounced.
“If you’re going to win in this league, you’ve got to play 200 feet now,” Hitchcock said. “You can’t play in 150.”
Most teams still trap situationally, especially to protect leads.
“There’s probably 15 teams that play 1-3-1,” Sabres Coach Lindy Ruff told The Buffalo News. “We play it on occasion. We like a couple different looks, though.”
Boucher has trapped with some success, largely to compensate for a mediocre defense corps. Facing Philadelphia, with two of his better defensemen out with injuries against the league’s top offense, Boucher had little choice but to use the trap to frustrate the Flyers. His team limited Philadelphia to a season-low 15 shots.
Also among the frustrated were some commentators who said the spectacle had embarrassed the league and hurt the game. But the impasse in the Flyers-Lightning game consumed about 6.5 percent of the game’s 62 ½ minutes, nothing like the full-game trapfests of the prelockout N.H.L.
Certainly fans don’t pay to watch teams stand still. But if the league’s managers start devising new rules, they would risk destroying the current balance between offense and defense, which has made for entertaining hockey the last six seasons.
Like Ruff and most coaches, Boucher uses the trap with other defensive formations to be unpredictable. There is no evidence that the prolonged stalling of the past will become a tactical fixture.
As Ruff said, “That’s his right to play whatever system he wants.”
Promoting Discipline
The N.H.L. is cracking down on injurious hits more than ever. And it is doing more to explain the rules to players. This month, Brendan Shanahan, the league’s new on-ice disciplinarian, started visiting teams to discuss what is and is not legal.
Still, when it comes to strictness, the N.H.L. is a far cry from the junior Ontario Hockey League.
Last week the O.H.L. gave a 20-game suspension to the Niagara IceDogs’ Tom Kuhnhackl for a runaway-train hit he delivered to the head of Kitchener Rangers defenseman Ryan Murphy, who sustained a concussion.
It was the eighth suspension of 10 or more games levied by Commissioner David Branch this season. The longest suspension handed down by Shanahan so far was nine games, to Columbus defenseman James Wisniewski during the preseason.
The O.H.L. has outlawed all head contact for about five years. It is partly motivated by the desire to protect teenage players — most of whom will never become professionals — from concussions, as well as the need to compete with colleges for players.
But it is also, as Branch said, an effort to “legislate respect, as best we can, back into the game.”
Another Howe Heads to Hall
On Monday, the Hockey Hall of Fame inducts its newest members: goalie Ed Belfour, centers Joe Nieuwendyk and Doug Gilmour, and defenseman Mark Howe.
Howe broke into the pro game on a line alongside his brother Marty and legendary father, Gordie, with the Houston Aeros of the World Hockey Association in 1973.
He went on to a career as a fine puck-moving defenseman with Hartford, Philadelphia and Detroit from 1979 to 1995, scoring as many as 24 goals and 82 points from the blue line in a season. But he was also rock-steady defensively. Howe finished at plus 400, the 10th-highest mark among N.H.L. players whose careers started after 1967.
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