Clearly one of Dale or JJ or both looked at our Dmen and decided it was best to go to man. Who was struggling at zone, if anyone, when they came on board.
I still laugh that Sarge got grounded.
I agree when we did finally get the breakout started, we were often discombobulated and no one knew where anyone would be.
We were one goal away from the ECF doing it.
When we played zone think 2 seasons ago, if Green didn't hit Ovi stretching the D, we also struggled, but it was more structured. Teams knew if they took out Green, we were dead in the water. And we were.
There's another difference people aren't getting. Hunter, for all his supposed incompetence understood the essence of successful hockey, something McPhee and so many other execs simply do not get. I guess it comes with being a successful grinding player, since Sutter seems to get it as well. The absolute best path to success is to limit the amount of thinking done by the players as much as possible. Thinking is the #1 enemy in professional sports. That's why teams always preach about "identity" and whatnot. Identity is a form of brainwashing, and brainwashing takes activities that require thought and makes them reflex. Ever see Mike Green spend 30 seconds at our goal line trying to think his way to a perfect breakout only to lob it to an icing/interception? Notice how that pretty much never happened under Hunter?
People think Datsyuk and Lidstrom and other successful high end hockey IQ players think the game through super hard and are successful because of it. In reality they give the same amount of thought as successful pluggers - very little. Lidstrom's breakouts and diffusion of dump ins were complete and utter reflex, as are Datsyuk's stick lifts. They have nothing going through their head as they are doing it. As a result, they are half a second to a second ahead of players who actually try to consciously think everything through, and that makes all the difference. Backstrom is the same - he makes offensive and defensive plays that look really well thought out but in reality have as much mental exertion behind them as Chimera barging in for an offsides, his instincts take care of the rest. So is Alzner - compare him defending a 2 on 1 vs Green or Schultz. He has absolutely no hesitation about what he is going to do - because he's not thinking about it, just completely following his instincts. Same with covering lanes, clearing the crease or diffusing dump and chases. IMO he's our most important defenseman and it's not close. Semin overthought pretty much everything, except on the PK where he shut his brain off (he personally said as much). As a result his PKing was always super impressive even though to the untrained eye he seems like the least capable PK guy in the league (other teams' fans think as much).
Under Boudreau we'd often see players defeated by their own brains. Green or Semin holding the puck on the PP for 45 seconds waiting for lanes to open up come to mind. Green lobbing the puck god knows where under zero pressure waiting for the perfect breakout (already mentioned above). Boudreau yelling at them which served only to confuse them further. I get the feeling we'll see lots of it again this year. After what we got used to last year on defense it will be especially painful.
The truth is, if we go back to Boudreau's style most of the effort we saw under Hunter will evaporate. Not because the players are lazy, but because the effort under him was reflexive. Everyone pulled back on defense without putting any thought into it. Everyone followed their man around without worrying about doing anything else. No one stood around thinking what they should do next - they just did it (on defense at least). This automatically gave them a huge advantage over teams trying to score - making offensive plays generally requires a fair deal of thought for most players, and as a result our guys on defense were always a split second ahead since they didn't have their brains slowing them down. This is why no team could ever pull away from us. Now, we'll go back to seeing Mike Green being the last man back, struggling with the puck as opposing players are closing in, and our guys locked in deep thought over whether they should cheat on offense or get back and support him. Didn't happen under Hunter other than maybe once or twice a series total.
Also, this beautiful, just and righteous war on thought is the reason for Hunter's much maligned empty net strategy - he wanted to completely eliminate that little parasitic idea that there's an empty net out there and scoring it would ice the game. It's an extremely tempting thought, but being an idea it inevitably interferes with the reflex and identity based performance he coveted. He reverse-inceptioned our guys. You can say it lost us the series against the Rangers, but really what lost it for us was Holtby's softy on Richards in game 7. That doesn't happen, we win, get crushed by the Devils who were slightly ahead of us on the APM curve, but finally have the 2nd round monkey off our back and know what to build on. Instead we can pretend like last year wasn't a huge step in the right diretion since the *end result* was the *same*. That seems to be the company line now. Go back to offense, let Ovi be Ovi, Oatsy will save us. Whoopde ****ing doo.
Hunter didn't have the time to (or maybe wasn't capable of) teaching them the same thoughtless offense, but it is possible to do so. Darryl Sutter did it and coached his team to the most dominant playoff run in recent if not all history. DeBoer did it and managed to get to the SCF with a plebeian defense and a 40 year old goalie who wasn't as great as everyone is fond of saying now. This is a tried and tested formula that works pretty much always. Who ever can perform the most complex actions while exerting the least amount of thought wins. Talents like speed, physicality, hockey IQ, good wrist shot, all let players do some things with much less thought than others. I'm pretty sure EA sports found a way to quantify all of it pretty accurately and that is why all their predictions are so accurate. If I was a crazy bearded man I'd work out the formula myself. Watch Devils-Flyers and Devils-Rangers again. Devils are on a completely another level offensively, even though the personnel for both was largely comparable. Both Rangers and Flyers put a lot more thought into their plays and as a result were much slower to react. Devils' forwards had about as much going through their minds as great whites do and as a result were just as lethal. Gionta-Carter-Bernier just derping away to great success, chipping away at the Rangers bit by bit. 3 AHLers bringing down the Richardss and Gaboriks of the world to their knees because they managed to run around and be at the right place at the right time simply because that's what their collective game added up to.
I'd suggest everyone to rewatch the final SCF game from last year as well. When the Kings have already put the game away, they are absolutely clinical in everything they do. There is no hesitation at any point. Not on defense, not on breakouts, not on clearing the zone, not on forecheck. Watch the last 5 minutes of that series. It's beautiful.