Many times in these playoffs, you might have heard commentators express astonishment about how a team is leaving the points uncovered when they're in their defensive zone.
Actually, as Al Strachan wrote today, it's a deliberate strategy, called The Playing-Card Five. Teams have realized that since you can't clutch and grab anymore and make speedy forwards try to make pretty plays with a 220-pound sack of potatoes strapped to their back, you can simply outnumber them. Below the top of the circles, the attacking team basically plays 3-on-5 hockey.
Strachan:
"In the earlier era, if you tried to use the Playing-Card Five, the winger who is supposed to cover the point would be held up on his way out there. But this is the no-restraint era.
"So in today's defensive system, you have the defencemen in their traditional positions, a centre who reacts to the location of the puck and wingers who cover their side of the ice.
"But at the first hint of the puck going back to the point, those wingers charge out there. Since the new approach not only places a premium on speed players, but also prevents them from being restrained, they get there so quickly that what had appeared to be a wide-open shot disappears faster than a Liberal stumbling upon an ethics convention.
"The point man now has the puck on his stick, but a charging forward is bearing down. Right behind that forward, in line with the net, is a defenceman.
"The point man has nowhere to shoot. He can try it if he wants to, and many do. That's why there were so many blocked shots this year."
The Playing-Card Five probably reached its apotheosis in Game 2 of the Buffalo-Ottawa series. The Senators outshot the Sabres 44-17, but with something like half those shots coming from their defencemen, lost 2-1. Tellingly, Buffalo scored, as I recall, on a 2-on-1 and on a breakaway after a Sens defenceman coughed up the puck just inside the Sabres blue-line.
It's not about the game being exciting now. It's that this system threatens to make the game less interesting over time. Even the hockey this year is starting to take on a predictable pattern.
There are more odd-man rushes, sure, but more often than not it comes down to whoever has the better power play. If you have a generalized idea of how the game turns out before you sit down to watch -- it's going to be a 4-2 final, with two power-play goals for the winning side -- then it's boring.
It sounds a lot like pre-lockout NHL hockey, which involved channel-surfing while you waited for your team to get a power play. The Sabres -- a team of smallish checkers who are able to frustrate opponents while riding a hot goalie -- owe a lot more to the 2003 Ducks, '99 Sabres or '96 Florida Panthers than they do to the '85 Oilers or '92 Penguins.
It just goes to show that new NHL or old NHL, the problem remains the same. Coaches need to win to keep their jobs, so they dumb the game down, or as they put it, "Keep it simple."
No matter what the league tries, crafty coaches come up with something, because there's no dancing around the obvious: with the size and speed of today's players, there's just not enough space on the ice when the teams are playing 5-on-5, even with the crackdown on obstruction tactics.
Strachan ended his column with, "The Playing-card Four is nowhere near as effective." He's referring to power plays, but the statement could apply to playing 4-on-4 hockey all the time.
So unless all that talk last summer about how the players and owners had learned their lessons from the lockout and would not take the game for granted was just one big tease, there should be serious discussions in the off-sesaon about going to 4-on-4 full-time. Sooner rather than later.
The Playing-Card Five might be at the same stage in its development and popularity as the neutral zone trap was in 1993-94, but you all know how the latter turned out.
OTHER BUSINESS
- Scott Carefoot has a capital idea -- the Raptors should see if they can trade Charlie Villanueva and get a second high draft pick, which could possibly be used on UConn point guard Marcus Williams. Carefoot analyzes the Raptors more closely than I do and believes that Charlie V and Chris Bosh, AKA The Franchise, might be ill-suited to a mutually beneficial co-existence.
- Here's a two-sport career Deion Sanders never tried: Ex-Red Sox left-fielder Mike Greenwell, the runner for AL MVP back in '88, makes his NASCAR debut on Saturday. Good for him.
- Are we seeing the war on coaches? Bill Simmons is calling for the return of the player-coach to the NBA. Slate's Josh Levin is even more succinct: Ban the timeout! Granted, it's not hard to be more succinct than Bill Simmons. Heh-heh-heh.
That's all for now. Let's go, Buffalo, even though I picked against you.
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