MHA said:
Paul Maurice made a great point today, he said teams are playing more defensive because they are forced too because of payroll. for instance when Carolina plays a stacked Detroit Red Wings they have to play a trap because they don't have the firepower. With payroll parity it will be much different.
Which would make a helluvalot more sense if the Red Wings hadn't been playing the left-wing lock. Which would make a lot more sense if the Wings didn't have a ton of defensive forwards committed to defense (Draper/Yzerman/Fedorov/Maltby).
And let's also get real before we paint the Wings as a team that bought all their cups.
They won their first cup with a roster that was largely homegrown.
Yzerman. Fedorov. Lidstrom. Kozlov. McCarty. Konstantinov. Lapointe. Dandenault. Holmstrom (can't recall if he and Dandy were really on the team). Kocur was back on the team he started his career with. Osgood.
Other guys on the team were traded for when they were young in their career: Draper/Maltby.
Shanahan was the one one big ticket item with a large price tag. But he came in a trade that cost an up and coming powerforward (Primeau) and a hall of fame defenseman (Coffey)
Vernon was picked up from Calgary for next to nothing.
Yes, the Wings payroll at the time was high. But that's because they'd kept a lot of those good players they drafted.
The Wings payroll didn't get out of hand until Carolina Hurricane owner Pete Karmanos (the guy who loves to whine about players' salaries) made that ridiculous offer to Fedorov. It was made in such a way that Illitch would have to pay a HUGE bonus up from, but Karmanos wouldn't have had to pay it because it seemed unlikely they'd made the conference finals.
Illitch wanted Fedorov. And he certainly didn't want Karmanos, a business rival from Detroit, to win his young star with such a sleazy offer.
So he matched it.
Problem is, now Illitch had to pay that big money to Yzerman, Shanahan, and Lidstrom.
This was the start of the "big spending" Red Wings.
But I'm way off track. Back to Maurice's point.
Fact is, it is easier to destroy offense than it is to create it. That is why defensive hockey is on the rise.
You want offense? Put an end to whacking/hacking/holding/hooking.
It's been here since the NHL's most recent expansion era. It has allowed the new, crappy expansion teams to lose 1-0 i and 2-1 instead of 7-5 and 6-2.
I suspect that the officials were instructed to let the obstruction go, so that the expansion teams in weak markets wouldn't get blown out every night.