NHL Fantasy League - Game On - Episode VI

[Sava]

Originally posted by Asher


Calgary dumps the puck in the offensive zone

correct...

and so does every other team when they get a lead and it's late in the game

that's not the neutral zone trap

the neutral zone trap is a specific style of hockey where players (mostly lesser skilled players) clog up the neutral zone in an attempt to generate turnovers, and prevent teams from passing the puck and carrying it into the offensive zone... it relies more on physical play, hooking, holding, etc... which is why few teams still use it under the new rules.

You can recognize the trap by the formation of the players... if you have Tivo or something, pause the TV and look where the players are. If you see all 5 guys in the neutral zone, sometimes almost in a straight line, THAT IS THE TRAP.

Calgary has never played the trap, AFAIK.

This is painful for me. Asher is right (in this case).

[Ninot]

Originally posted by Sava

You can recognize the trap by the formation of the players... if you have Tivo or something, pause the TV and look where the players are. If you see all 5 guys in the neutral zone, sometimes almost in a straight line, THAT IS THE TRAP.

Calgary has never played the trap, AFAIK.

This is painful for me. Asher is right (in this case).

There are different ways to do it.

Calgary was effectively doing it last night.

If you have a means, checkout the game. I guarantee you once the Habs were in the Neutral zone, Calgary fell into a trap.

[Sava]

Originally posted by Ninot



There are different ways to do it.

Calgary was effectively doing it last night.

If you have a means, checkout the game. I guarantee you once the Habs were in the Neutral zone, Calgary fell into a trap.

Playing defensively and then dumping the puck (which is probably what Calgary was doing) IS NOT THE NEUTRAL ZONE TRAP!

The neutral zone trap is a very specific and organized style of hockey. Calgary does not play it. Period.

Stop arguing this. You are wrong. If you think Calgary plays the trap, you don't understand what the trap is.

[Asher]

Originally posted by Ninot
There are different ways to do it.

Calgary was effectively doing it last night.

If you have a means, checkout the game. I guarantee you once the Habs were in the Neutral zone, Calgary fell into a trap.

Calgary does not play the trap, if you mention the trap to Darryl Sutter he fumes. He hates the trap.

The trap doesn't fit a team like Calgary. When you've got several lines of forwards that can all aggressively forecheck, you don't need to send just one guy in to forecheck and then clog up the neutral zone. Calgary does it one better and "clogs" the puck in the offensive end by dumping it in and crashing into all of the players. By the time they clear it out, the players are exhausted.

It's not the trap, Ninot.

One of the reasons Calgary is pretty good at playing eastern conference teams is they're not used to that kind of game. Most of the western conference teams are getting more adept at playing Calgary and dictating a different style...Edmonton was successful at doing that a couple times, and that's how they won.

BTW, this is also why Calgary very seldom has highlight-reel goals. Most of the goals are "dirty goals" because the players are all tired, mistakes are made, rebounds are whacked in repeatedly, etc.

[Asher]

One team that still uses the trap pretty regularly is Minnesota. Their style of winning seems to depend on getting turnovers and then using their speed to break in past the defense and get shots...

[Asher]

Originally posted by dejon
Huh - I'm actually getting tired of Asher vs. anyone hockey banter/arguments - they all seem to be the same.

It's tough to be right consistently.

Iginla is definitely lighting it up now. Gionta is doing better than I expected, admittedly, but I still think Iginla is going to eclipse Gionta in goals per game.

[Sava]

Originally posted by Asher
Calgary very seldom has highlight-reel goals. Most of the goals are "dirty goals"... rebounds are whacked in repeatedly, etc.

Agreed.

But this is because Calgary doesn't have a lot of skilled players outside of Iginla.

Amonte is the only other player on that roster that could be considered a skill player, and he's on the downside of his career.

Calgary has success because they play a dump and chase, forechecking game, and they rely on their goaltender to keep them in games.

They don't play the neutral zone trap.

[Hot Mustard]

Note to others: Columbus players are bad for your +/-.

I know, not so shocking. But I didn't think it would be quite this bad...I'm -17 and counting.

[Sava]

damnit...
I need to play either Nabokov or Toskala on Saturday, but I don't know who San Jose is going to start... and there is no indication who they plan to start.

I need both Luongo and that San Jose goalie game or else I don't get enough goalie games for the week

BUT I WON'T WIN GOALIE STATS FOR THE WEEK ANYWAYS SO IT'S NOT LIKE IT MATTERS ANYWAYS

SJKFHSDFk;K:LSDFJSADKL:Fj;KLSAJF:KLJSADFjKLSDFJklS DJFKL:S

but still, I don't want to lose by forfeit

I know which ever guy I pick is going to be the wrong one

I ****ing hate this ****

[Imran Siddiqui]

Originally posted by Asher
Why is it that most people who mention "the trap" have no idea what it is?

Calgary plays a hard forechecking game. That is not the trap. If you want the trap, look at the Devils from a couple years ago.

Why is it that most people who mention "the trap" have no idea what it is?

The Devils from a couple years ago played a double forechecker game under Pat Burns. That is not the trap. If you want the trap, look at the Devils from the mid 1990s.

[Asher]

Now you're playing with semantics.

I've never heard of "double forechecker" in my life. And google has 0 results for it...

[Imran Siddiqui]

Not at all. Pat Burns doesn't play the trap. Neither does Larry Robinson. The Devils haven't played the trap since Jaques Lemaire left.

[Asher]

I was under the impression that until last season, the Devils still deployed variations of the trap. It's not the textbook-style that Lemaire had, but a modified one with 2 checkers instead of 1...with the same idea and goal?

Most commentators regarded the Devils as still playing the trap last season, IIRC. But I admittedly never watched many (any?) Devils games last season ( )

[Imran Siddiqui]

The Devils haven't played a trap for quite a while. Why would they with a new coach installing an entirely different system?

Hell, back in the 1999 Playoffs and 2000 Playoffs (against Colorado and Dallas in the Finals respectively), they had abandoned the trap.

[Asher]

Will have to take your word for it -- I can't recall.

Did find this interesting article on the history of the trap (from Jan 2004):

Caught in a trap: almost every team in the NHL has implemented a "system," but what exactly does that mean? - Hockey Digest Analysis
Hockey Digest, Jan-Feb, 2004 by John Kreiser

REMEMBER FIRE-WAGON HOCKEY? "Espo" and the Big, Bad Bruins, or Gretzky and the Offers terrorizing goaltenders? High-scoring forwards who could net 60 goals and. 150 points? Defensemen with 100-plus points?

Seem like a distant memory? You're right.

Welcome to the Dead Puck Era. The days when goalies got sunburns from the red lights going on behind them are long gone. Offenses in the early years of the 21st Century have fallen into a trap--and they can't get out.

Hockey today isn't about piling up goals. It's about shutting down opponents and minimizing their scoring chances. Offense in many cases is almost a secondary consideration.

The reason? Call it the Trap. Call it the Left-Wing Lock. Call it the System. But call it effective--no team since the 1994 New York Rangers has won the Stanley Cup without using large doses of a defense-first system that's designed to minimize the opponent's opportunities ... and a lot of the game's excitement.

"The object is to take away the opposition's time and space," says New York Islanders coach Steve Stirling, who has installed what he calls "the system" on a team that rarely played anything resembling one last season. "We want to eliminate 3-on-2's and 2-on-1's and we want to provide some more support for guys down low."

The trap, actually the "neutral zone trap," is nothing new--it's merely a 1-2-2 forechecking system that's been around for generations. Former Toronto Maple Leafs defenseman Bob Baun recently told ex-New York Rangers star Rod Gilbert, who had complained about the offense-deadening effects of today's defensive systems, that his Toronto teams in the 1960s used the same system to beat the Rangers (and a lot of other teams) when they were winning Stanley Cups. Ironically, today's Leafs under Pat Quinn are one of the increasingly few teams that doesn't trap extensively.

Playing a trap-reliant system has become so prevalent that even Glen Sather, who coached the Gretzky-led Edmonton Oilers to unprecedented levels of scoring in the 1980s, spent much of training camp installing a "system" on his current team, the New York Rangers.

Trap 101

But what exactly is the trap? If you were to compare hockey to basketball, switching from a pressure-the-puck system (think Mike Keenan-style hockey, such as the Rangers played when he coached them to the Cup a decade ago) to one that relies on the trap would be like switching from a man-to-man defense to a soft zone press that relies on teammates to support one another. In basketball, you force the dribbler to the sidelines and try to eliminate his passing lanes; in hockey, you angle the puck-carrier toward one side and do the same.

The classic 1-2-2 trap is a forechecking pattern designed to take away the puck-handler's time and space, forcing him to throw the puck away or turn it over. Basically, instead of flooding the zone with forecheckers, a trapping team will send only one checker into the zone (usually not too deep), putting two more players near the blue line and keeping the defensemen back at the red line or slightly further back.

When the puck-carrier tries to come out of the zone, the forechecker and the second-wave player on that side try to angle him toward the boards, while the other player moves to cut off any passing lanes and the defensemen choke off any breaks while further clogging things up. Ideally, the puck-carrier gets over his own blue line with nowhere to go and no time to do much of anything--leaving him the choice of icing the puck, throwing it away, or allowing it to be taken away in a scrum or a double-team.

After that, it's a question of philosophy: What does the team taking the puck away try to do with it? If you're ahead and trying to kill time, the answer is usually to make the safe play, get the puck deep into the offensive zone, and make the opponent start again.

That's the common conception of the trap--a system that's not only defense-first, but often defense-only. Playing catch-up against a good trapping team can be about as frustrating as trying to beat up a sofa pillow--no matter how hard you work, it's almost impossible to get any satisfaction. When a shooter does get through, he's usually shunted to the outside, where he's less of a threat to score.

But the trap can also be used as an offensive weapon. When played well, the system can generate a lot of turnovers, potentially offering the chance for odd-man rushes and scoring opportunities.

"People hear the word 'trap' and think it's boring hockey," Islanders forward Mark Parrish says. "But if you play it right, you can generate enough offense."

You don't have to be a checking specialist to like this kind of a system. One of the first Islanders to express his pleasure with the change in strategy was center Alexei Yashin, their top scorer. The system Stirling brought to Long Island is similar to the one Yashin flourished under in Ottawa, where he scored as many as 44 goals and 94 points.

Players like Yashin like the system because they're no longer required to be great individual defenders. Even if Yashin's man beats him, he still has to get past a couple of other layers of checkers to get a good scoring opportunity. And when offensively skilled players like Yashin force a turnover, they axe more likely able to do something with it.

"I don't see it as a defensive system," says Yashin, who was often ripped by Stirling's successor, Peter Laviolette, for his defensive play. Laviolette eschewed the trap in favor of puck pressure--often despite entreaties from his own players to switch to a defense-first system. "You can still create a lot of offensive chances if you do everything right. We're still learning how to play it, but if we learn how to score off the transition, we'll have more than enough chances."

The Trap Revived

The current trap and its derivatives" began to take hold in the mid-1990s, when expansion diluted the NHL's talent base and coaches of some of the new teams began to wonder how they could compete with teams that had a lot more offensive skill. The answer turned out to be simple: If you can't outgun more-talented teams, slow them down with a system that minimized the effects of talent and maximized the impact of hard work and positioning. Clogging up the middle of the ice, legally or illegally (depending on your view of all the hooking, tugging, obstruction, and holding that was going on), enabled teams whose rosters didn't contain names like Gretzky and Lemieux to compete (and often beat) those that did.

The Florida Panthers were the prototype for this kind of trapping team. Coach Roger Neilson knew that he wouldn't get much offensive talent in the expansion draft. But there were some talented goal-tenders and hard-working checkers available, so the panthers nabbed John Vanbiesbrouck to play goal, then filled out their roster with players of limited offensive skills whose biggest attribute was their willingness to work hard.

The formula worked: The Panthers barely missed the playoffs in their first season, and, with Doug MacLean behind the bench, reached the Stanley Cup Finals in their fourth. Said Vanbiesbrouck at the lime, "People can say what they want about the trap, but we're a humble team."

By then, though, the New Jersey Devils had shown that elite teams could trap effectively, too. Jacques Lemaire brought the trap to New Jersey in 1993 and took a team that had been spinning its wheels for years to an overtime loss in Game 7 of the Eastern Conference finals. A year later, the Devils were champions, having trapped their way to a sweep of the Detroit Red Wings.

Lemaire's early teams made life miserable for opponents by forcing turnovers and converting them into goals. His first team averaged well over three goals a game, and the Cup champions scored 16 goals in sweeping Detroit. Lemaire left after the 1997-98 season, but under Robbie Ftorek and then Larry Robinson, the 1999-2000 Stanley Cup championship team and the 2000-01 Cup Finalists were among the highest-scoring clubs in the league.

But by then, goal-scoring was becoming a lost art. A league that had seen an average of 8.03 goals a game in 1981-82 and 7.24 per contest in 1992-93 began to suffer from a scoring drought [See chart, page 53.] Goals per game fell to 5.97 per game in 1994-95 and kept falling--they've hovered between 5.24 and 5.54 for the past six seasons, despite efforts by the NHL to put more offense into the game by tinkering with the size of the neutral zone and the area behind the nets, mandating annual crackdowns on obstruction fouls, and, this year, keeping a closer eye on the size of goaltenders' equipment.

And the trap isn't the only reason for the drought. Twenty years after Wayne Gretzky scored a record 92 goals in 1981-82, he told a writer that breaking that record today Would be difficult because "back then, there were only a few goal-tenders who were good athletes; today, they're all good athletes." Today's NHL goaltender isn't the fat kid who had to play goalie because he couldn't skate--he's more liable to be the best athlete in the neighborhood. And he's wearing better (and bigger) equipment while profiting from a level of instruction at a young age that his predecessors never got. But the arrival of the trap heralded the end of the Oilers-led era, when teams tried to beat the opposition with firepower, and the return of the defense-first mentality that marked the Original Six era of the 1950s, when 4-2 games were offensive explosions.

Like a weed that's taken ever the garden, the trap and its mutations are everywhere these days. Coaches love trapping systems because they give them more control; players who don't have a lot of offensive skills like them because it places a premium on hard work rather than talent. About the only ones who don't like it are fans who want to see games end 6-4 rather than 3-1.

A trapping system won't work on a team with big egos. A player who's not Willing to subordinate himself to the system will play himself off a trapping team. Individualists need not apply--players have to be willing to back each other up and provide support on and off the puck. Players have to be patient and rely on each other, fostering a sense of teamwork that's often missing on high-offense squads.

So how do you beat the trap? The best way is quick puck movement, either with short passes that don't allow the opposition to get set or with a defenseman who can beat the first checker. But the best way is probably to get a lead. Like a football team that relies on a ground game but has to pass when it gets down a couple of touchdowns, teams that rely on trap systems often have to come out of their shells if they get down a couple of goals. Other than that, as then-Devils forward Claude Lemieux said after his team's first title, "If you don't like our style, go watch another show."