Wasn't this also an issue with Hynes? Having a ton of complicated decisions that needed to be made in a millisecond?
For a time, Hynes ran an unusual system where the defender, once challenging a puck carrier, would never disengage.
The defender, possibly a defenseman, could pick up a guy in the left corner, follow him to the left point, follow him to the right point, and follow him back down to the right corner.
Hynes did eventually do away with this. Also, other teams do dabble with this concept.
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It does make me wonder if the Devils front office/analytics gets a little enamored with complicated systems that work amazing when everything works perfect but have issues in real life.
The swarm and defender not disengaging both seem to be things teams have in their repertoire for special situations that the Devils turned into core tenets of their systems.
Both Hynes and Ruff seemed to run a complicated system because they didn’t trust the Devils to be effective defensively under a more traditional system. I’m not sure I agree with that with this current Devils roster but we have nothing to compare against so who knows?