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Wasn't sure where to put this. Thought about the general hockey thread, but it's a pretty broad topic on it's own. This is all stuff I've been thinking and talking about for a while, but I want to kinda condense it all into a single narrative.
Back in the 70s and 80s, hockey was known as a high-flying, back and forth game. Certainly there were changes in playing style throughout that period, but I'm far from an expert. We know about Doug Harvey popularized and then Bobby Orr perfected defensemen leading the rush. Gretzky popularized/perfected using the space behind the net. But generally speaking, it was pretty wide open and flowed back and forth. In the 90s, Roger Neilson and the Panthers popularized and the Devils perfected the trap, and for a period of a little over ten years, we had the dead puck era, where the flow of the game was disrupted by trapping, interference and obstruction. I don't care exactly how accurate that all is; that's the narrative, and narrative is a very useful thing.
During the dead puck era, you began to see more continuous time in one team's zone, as the trapped team couldn't get past the center red line. Thinking back on the 2003 Cup finals, you might easily mistake it for a game from 2010-15, the way New Jersey racked up the corsi. After the lockout season, new rules were introduced to limit teams' ability to trap. You then had a period of about five years of pretty wide open, back and forth hockey. Dean Lombardi was a big moneyball fan, and wanted to build his team on analytics. And we remember Billy Beane's obsession with getting on base. In hockey the most fundamental analytic tool became corsi, "does his team outshoot the opponent when he's on the ice". So Lombardi decided the way to go about this would be to build a big, strong team that could control play down low. Something like the trap, where it was a way for less skilled team to dictate play against a more skilled team. With L.A.'s success, it became clear to the world that corsi was the new way to go. But, at the same time L.A. was building their powerhouse, something was going on just up the coast to the north. The Sedins were doing something magical - people weren't thinking of it so much in these terms yet, but the Sedins were dominating corsi every time they were on the ice, but in a very different way than the Kings were doing it. No matter, the Sedins were something special, unique - a statistical aberration in every way, not reproducible.
Or maybe I'm looking at this wrong, perhaps smart hockey people did recognize better than fans and media what was going on. Perhaps those first round matchups between L.A. and Vancouver and in 2010 and 2012, and the Cup final between Vancouver and the Big Bad Bruins were important case studies for the best way to implement the drive toward corsi.
After the Bruins' and Kings' Cups, there was a push from most teams to get bigger and stronger. Chicago was also a pretty big team in 2010 and 2013, but they were so talented they don't really count. Remember, like the Oakland Athletics, and the early Panthers, this move towards corsi was supposed to help less talented teams compete with more talented teams. Chicago was about as talented as you could get post-lockout. But then came Chicago's 2015 Cup, led by Patrick Kane's puck wizardry, a team that no longer had Byfuglien, Bickell, Ladd, Handzus. How did they do it? Well the next year, they didn't have the same playoff success, but Kane and Panarin looked like the new Sedin twins, except they were doing more of their cycling high in the zone, rather than in the corners like the Sedins did. Then you had Pittsburgh win their Cups with a faster, more skilled team., although they also had Kunitz and Hornqvist up front.
So we are now in the corsi era, and unlike the dead puck era, I'm not sure we're ever getting out, at least not any time soon. Of course teams still need to get the puck from one zone to the other, and breakaways and scoring off the rush are still crucial aspects of the game, but continuous zone possession is at the forefront of the game now, however it is achieved.
This means that, of course skating speed is always going to be imperative, but now more important than ever is evasive skating. St. Louis showed that you can still do things the L.A. way and win a Cup with size, and Tampa was again like the early Blackhawks, where they were so skilled it doesn't really matter. But agility, edges, skating technique are moving to the forefront. Powerful multidirectional acceleration is crucial now in winning short range races to the puck to try to maintain or disrupt possession. In the mold of Kane and Panarin, or Barzal and his line, keepaway is the name of the game, and so you're seeing forwards like Stuetzle and Raymond, like Stranges and Amirov, and now coming up, Michkov and Bedard. Of course being able to pass the puck around is important to play keepaway, but adding a dynamic skating element just takes it to another level . Another critical new aspect to the drive for zone possession is that defensemen need to be able to pinch and jump into the play offensively more than ever, and again for them, skating technique has been vital for that - the ability to quickly jump up into the play, or quickly accelerate back if a pinch backfires, to change directions smoothly. But this has led to a very interesting development - we now have all these defensemen coming up like Heiskanen, Makar, Hughes, Drysdale, Hughes, Clarke, and in one important sense, as I've just described, these skating skills are a very useful offensive tool, but in another sense, they are also a weapon against zone possession. The way these defensemen can skate evasively in their own zone, so that if they can get a hold of the puck for just a second, they are extremely effective at moving the puck out of their zone, thus eliminating the opponent's possession.
So I'm still trying to understand where exactly this is all going and I mostly feel like I have no idea. But what I'm thinking now is, maybe we're at the point that we've figured out all the different ways to create zone possession, and seen how each has been utilized, so maybe the next focus is on how to disrupt zone possession. Going back to the point about the game evolving based on weaker teams' attempts to adapt, if the best teams by today's standards are the teams that dominate corsi, how can lesser teams contend with that? Aside from the elite-skating defensemen I've mentioned, what about guys like Mukhamadullin, Luneau and Nemec, who excel at separating bodies from pucks and quickly moving the puck out immediate danger to relieve pressure? Are players like Stranges, Michkov, Bedard, going to take the evasive skating from forwards to yet another level?
Back in the 70s and 80s, hockey was known as a high-flying, back and forth game. Certainly there were changes in playing style throughout that period, but I'm far from an expert. We know about Doug Harvey popularized and then Bobby Orr perfected defensemen leading the rush. Gretzky popularized/perfected using the space behind the net. But generally speaking, it was pretty wide open and flowed back and forth. In the 90s, Roger Neilson and the Panthers popularized and the Devils perfected the trap, and for a period of a little over ten years, we had the dead puck era, where the flow of the game was disrupted by trapping, interference and obstruction. I don't care exactly how accurate that all is; that's the narrative, and narrative is a very useful thing.
During the dead puck era, you began to see more continuous time in one team's zone, as the trapped team couldn't get past the center red line. Thinking back on the 2003 Cup finals, you might easily mistake it for a game from 2010-15, the way New Jersey racked up the corsi. After the lockout season, new rules were introduced to limit teams' ability to trap. You then had a period of about five years of pretty wide open, back and forth hockey. Dean Lombardi was a big moneyball fan, and wanted to build his team on analytics. And we remember Billy Beane's obsession with getting on base. In hockey the most fundamental analytic tool became corsi, "does his team outshoot the opponent when he's on the ice". So Lombardi decided the way to go about this would be to build a big, strong team that could control play down low. Something like the trap, where it was a way for less skilled team to dictate play against a more skilled team. With L.A.'s success, it became clear to the world that corsi was the new way to go. But, at the same time L.A. was building their powerhouse, something was going on just up the coast to the north. The Sedins were doing something magical - people weren't thinking of it so much in these terms yet, but the Sedins were dominating corsi every time they were on the ice, but in a very different way than the Kings were doing it. No matter, the Sedins were something special, unique - a statistical aberration in every way, not reproducible.
Or maybe I'm looking at this wrong, perhaps smart hockey people did recognize better than fans and media what was going on. Perhaps those first round matchups between L.A. and Vancouver and in 2010 and 2012, and the Cup final between Vancouver and the Big Bad Bruins were important case studies for the best way to implement the drive toward corsi.
After the Bruins' and Kings' Cups, there was a push from most teams to get bigger and stronger. Chicago was also a pretty big team in 2010 and 2013, but they were so talented they don't really count. Remember, like the Oakland Athletics, and the early Panthers, this move towards corsi was supposed to help less talented teams compete with more talented teams. Chicago was about as talented as you could get post-lockout. But then came Chicago's 2015 Cup, led by Patrick Kane's puck wizardry, a team that no longer had Byfuglien, Bickell, Ladd, Handzus. How did they do it? Well the next year, they didn't have the same playoff success, but Kane and Panarin looked like the new Sedin twins, except they were doing more of their cycling high in the zone, rather than in the corners like the Sedins did. Then you had Pittsburgh win their Cups with a faster, more skilled team., although they also had Kunitz and Hornqvist up front.
So we are now in the corsi era, and unlike the dead puck era, I'm not sure we're ever getting out, at least not any time soon. Of course teams still need to get the puck from one zone to the other, and breakaways and scoring off the rush are still crucial aspects of the game, but continuous zone possession is at the forefront of the game now, however it is achieved.
This means that, of course skating speed is always going to be imperative, but now more important than ever is evasive skating. St. Louis showed that you can still do things the L.A. way and win a Cup with size, and Tampa was again like the early Blackhawks, where they were so skilled it doesn't really matter. But agility, edges, skating technique are moving to the forefront. Powerful multidirectional acceleration is crucial now in winning short range races to the puck to try to maintain or disrupt possession. In the mold of Kane and Panarin, or Barzal and his line, keepaway is the name of the game, and so you're seeing forwards like Stuetzle and Raymond, like Stranges and Amirov, and now coming up, Michkov and Bedard. Of course being able to pass the puck around is important to play keepaway, but adding a dynamic skating element just takes it to another level . Another critical new aspect to the drive for zone possession is that defensemen need to be able to pinch and jump into the play offensively more than ever, and again for them, skating technique has been vital for that - the ability to quickly jump up into the play, or quickly accelerate back if a pinch backfires, to change directions smoothly. But this has led to a very interesting development - we now have all these defensemen coming up like Heiskanen, Makar, Hughes, Drysdale, Hughes, Clarke, and in one important sense, as I've just described, these skating skills are a very useful offensive tool, but in another sense, they are also a weapon against zone possession. The way these defensemen can skate evasively in their own zone, so that if they can get a hold of the puck for just a second, they are extremely effective at moving the puck out of their zone, thus eliminating the opponent's possession.
So I'm still trying to understand where exactly this is all going and I mostly feel like I have no idea. But what I'm thinking now is, maybe we're at the point that we've figured out all the different ways to create zone possession, and seen how each has been utilized, so maybe the next focus is on how to disrupt zone possession. Going back to the point about the game evolving based on weaker teams' attempts to adapt, if the best teams by today's standards are the teams that dominate corsi, how can lesser teams contend with that? Aside from the elite-skating defensemen I've mentioned, what about guys like Mukhamadullin, Luneau and Nemec, who excel at separating bodies from pucks and quickly moving the puck out immediate danger to relieve pressure? Are players like Stranges, Michkov, Bedard, going to take the evasive skating from forwards to yet another level?
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