Olivier of En Attendant Les Nordiques tracked the scoring chances for the Pens-Habs series. There were a pair of articles that prompted me to take a look at the quantity and quality of chances that the Pens and Habs were getting when Sidney Crosby was on the ice in that series. Roy MacGregor had an article in the Globe and Mail on Friday about what he sees as the silliness of the obsession with systems at the NHL level:
“We’ll be all right,” the player smothered in a scrum of cameras and microphones will say, “so long as we stick to our system.”
It has a heft unlike so many other meaningless hockey phrases – “Our best players have to be our best players”; “We can’t get too high and can’t get too low”; “We have to take it one game at a time”; “It is what it is” – in that the mere word “systems” has the air of a secret handshake, or else could conceivably be some plan so complicated that the pickled brain of the average hockey writer could not possibly comprehend its intricacies.
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Coaches speak of “time and space” as if it were quantum physics not merely a goofy new phrase for checking. They speak of “gaps” as if they could be as finitely measured and set as those on spark plugs.
Pittsburgh Penguins coach Dan Bylsma actually said last week that he wanted his team to be playing “north of the puck” – whatever that means.
The truth is that these so-called systems are about as complicated as going to the fridge for a beer between periods.
“Let’s fact it,” says Bob Hartley, who coached the Colorado Avalanche to a previous Stanley Cup, “there’s not 25 ways to play hockey.
“It’s really pretty simple.
“You show me a good system and I’ll show you a good goaltender.”