I am jumping into this conversation late and without context, but I’ll bite.
“North-South” hockey is the concept of advancing the puck up the ice as quickly as possible and with as little lateral passing as possible. It’s conservative hockey, in the sense that it prioritizes getting the puck as far away from your own net as quickly as possible, even if it means giving up the puck via dump in, and avoiding lateral passes in the neutral zone, which, if intercepted, can lead to odd-man rushes the other way. “East-West” hockey says it’s okay to pass laterally or backwards if there is no way forward, and prioritizes possession over “the safe play” of the dump in. To your point, these are concepts, not actual X’s and O’s. It’s like a feel in pitching mechanics or the golf swing. Sometimes when the team isn’t moving the puck crisply or the other team is picking off passes in the neural zone, the coach will tell the guys to “get back to North-South” hockey.
Literally all I was looking for. Amazing that you can have a discussion when you're willing to participate.
This is pretty much what I figured. Now, to follow up, there's a lot of dumping it in. Does this not inherently lead to forecheck and cycling assuming your dump-in was successful? Like, obviously it's not the exact same thing, but to me there's an obvious association there. I'm surprised by how set off some people were by that. We do cycle a lot, especially the kids, and do nothing with it.
Back to the Rangers, if that's the standard, then I stand by "this team isn't N/S enough" being a bit of a bizarre criticism. With the obvious exceptions of Fox and Panarin, I mostly find this team unwilling and/or unable to move laterally.
As for Panarin, specifically, he does make really poor lateral passes but 1) you sign up for that when you acquire him and 2) it reflects especially poorly when he's trying to do that and the team around him isn't conducive to doing that.
Besides Panarin, who on our team is an above average passer? Who on our team has penetrating, beat-a-guy-1v1-hands? Where's all the E/W play that's always a subject of criticism?
Some guys probably can, but they don't on the Rangers.
See, now we're cooking instead of screaming about semantics. Thank you, Crease.