Offense in NHL is soaring because puck-rushing defensemen are changing the game - The Boston Globe
Today’s grass roots-level focus on skill development and skating has given the NHL more pace-pushers.
You don’t need to crack open the Farmers’ Almanac to know we’re soon to hit a winter chill. NHL offenses will slow down as the seasons change, the freewheeling frenzy of fall hitting a post-holiday lull, into a January-February hibernation that has everyone looking toward the postseason for renewed excitement.
Or at least we think. The forecast might remain sizzling through June.
We are in yet another season in which goals have been plentiful. Teams were scoring 3.21 times per game as of Friday, the highest mark since 1993-94. Last year, it finished at 3.14, the third season in the last four it was north of 3.0.
Entering the weekend, the league-average save percentage was .904. For a full season, it hasn’t dipped below .900 since 1995-96. These are puck-stopping rates we haven’t seen since the 2005-06 post-lockout year (.901), which was juiced by teams getting a league-record 5.85 power plays a game.
One more measure of how hot offenses have been: Power-play success across the league was 22.95 percent, which recalls the waves of booming slappers that washed over stand-up netminders in the mid-1980s. The highest full-season number on record in that category is 22.94, in 1983, so we’re in range for a historical high.
It’s just not unusual to see scoreboards flashing 7s, 8s, and 9s these days.
“The chances that are being created now are high-end chances,” Bruins coach Jim Montgomery said. “A lot of them are. Everyone talks about the slot line, if you go through the middle of the zone with a pass to a teammate, they’re hard to save. Now a goalie’s not standing there square, he’s like this” — Montgomery spread his arms as he shifted his body — “and there’s holes.”
Much of it — and we’ve seen this before in Boston — is about defensemen changing the game. The Orr-era Bruins (5.12 goals per game) helped the NHL hit the three goals per game mark for some 25 years, pushing toward four in the early-to-mid-1980s. Then came the frigid days of the mid-1990s and early-2000s, when bigger-than-ever players were allowed to smother opponents.
Today’s grass-roots focus on individual skill development and skating has given the NHL more pace-pushers who happen to line up on the blue line. Glass-and-out is rare when everyone can skate and handle the puck.
As such, rigidly defined assignments are becoming less necessary. It’s hard to call today’s hockey positionless, since forwards still score the overwhelming majority of the goals, and defensemen are almost always the last skaters back. Perhaps position-light is a better term.
“At younger ages, there’s really only two roles in hockey: offense and defense,” said USA Hockey director of player development Roger Grillo, who played defense at Maine and coached at Brown. “Either our team has the puck or we have to get it back. How that looks is based on decisions made by the players.”
At the early-teenage stage, Grillo said, American amateur coaches should focus their players on understanding four free-flowing roles: a player with the puck, the offensive players without the puck, the defender who’s challenging the puck, and defenders off the puck.
“If you watch higher-end hockey nowadays, there’s really only one time you can tell who’s playing what position, if you don’t already know, and that’s off a faceoff,” Grillo said. “It’s not black and white anymore, it’s gray. There’s no designated spots to be. It’s all based off of reads.”
Montgomery has been like a parent who offers their toddler several positive choices. He’s creating the environment for them to succeed.
“I think that’s what’s so great about Monty’s system,” Foligno said last month. “It’s so fast but predictable. We really enjoy playing it. I think it’s tailored toward a lot of guys in the room. We feel that when we are playing, we know where guys are supposed to be. You can have that sixth sense.
“It’s dangerous, because we’re playing with so much speed, too. With those guys in the right spots, it makes it really hard on other teams. You’re seeing that right now. Positioning, but also where the puck’s going to go. We know where our routes are going to be on breakouts. We know our forecheck. There’s little rules of thumb. It’s not set in stone.”
Montgomery recalled how his coach at Maine, the late Shawn Walsh, always knew where the outs were on the ice. He sees today’s game as more fluid than ever.
“Everyone’s interchangeable,” Montgomery said. “Players who grew up with it are used to it. Players are physically faster, even faster than they were a decade ago, but more importantly, everyone plays faster.
“I think the offense is going to be ahead of defense, if you’re looking at goals per game, over the next couple years. But coaches will figure it out, like they figured out how to go through the trap better and create offense. The defense is going to catch up. It’s just the way the game goes. You’ve got to figure out a way to stop players like [Cale] Makar, McAvoy, Lindholm.”
“You still have boundaries that you’re giving people,” Montgomery said. “For instance, a D man, we want them in the rush, but if there’s nothing going on by the time you hit the tops of the circles, you’re not involved in the play. Let the forwards go. We still want to have ice balance. The onus has become more on the player with the puck to make good decisions so we maintain the ability to have scoring chances or possession.”
“If you go back 30 years ago, if a turnover happened above the tops of the circles in the offensive zone, and the defenseman was trying to get open offensively, the defenseman got yelled at, because he wasn’t in a position to back up the play. That’s no longer the mentality. That’s been a big shift.”
Bruins Hall of Famer Ray Bourque, a three-zone force in his heyday (1979-2001), is enjoying watching Monty Hockey. “I found my way into those areas many times,” he said of the danger zone below the dots. “Some guys didn’t want to. It’s different now. The six D move pretty well. Back then, not everybody did.”
At the younger levels, Grillo expects that position-light hockey will continue to flourish.
“The modern coach, coaching the modern athlete, will have more success if ownership is given to the players, and the structure part of the game isn’t set in stone,” he said. “I always tell coaches: it’s building a frame and letting the players paint within it. You have your structure, but don’t be paint-by-numbers — ‘you go there, you go there.’ You take away their decision-making and their reads, and development stops.”
