TAKING A DIVE: Post columnist Larry Brooks says the number of attempted blocked shots, like Ryan McDonaugh’s attempt to prevent Alex Ovechkin getting a good shot on Henrik Lundqvist in Game 3, is getting out of hand. (Neil Miller)
The new-age rules were supposed to promote skill, supposed to open up the game, supposed to spotlight the best and the brightest of the NHL, but in the Stanley Cup playoffs in Year Seven of the hard-cap era have largely been distilled to a matter of which team can block the most shots.
The blocked shot and coaches’ obsession with it as a means toward ending an opponents’ season have become hockey’s version of baseball’s pitch count, an art that might lead to victory but has made the game less entertaining and has perverted the framers’ original intent.
The Rangers and Capitals will play a pivotal Game 5 tonight at Madison Square Garden in an eastern semifinal matchup that might otherwise be known as the Blocked Shot Series. Next to nothing gets through on either side, with both sides committed to doing whatever is necessary to prevent the puck from reaching the goaltender and in that way minimize scoring chances.
The risk these players are willing to take game after game, shift after shift is worthy of adulation, but it’s come to the point that Yankees-Red Sox games reached around 2006, when ultimate drama had been transformed into something else after a string of games that lasted 4:30 and featured a combined 350 pitches per nine innings.
The increase in blocked shots around hockey does not equate to an increase in commitment toward winning the Stanley Cup. It’s just the latest strategy devised to negate talent, like the trap before the lockout that everyone hated with a passion.
Winning teams have always sacrificed and been committed. These days, maybe some coaches should be committed, but there has been no fundamental change over the last 30 years in the amount of effort and sacrifice required to win the Stanley Cup.
Seven Washington forwards got more ice time than Leapin’ Alex Ovechkin (15:09) in the Caps’ Game 4, 3-2 victory on Saturday, bringing to mind the old joke about Dean Smith being the only coach able to stop Michael Jordan when they were together at UNC.
But that’s how the league has evolved in Year Seven of the post-lockout era in which the more gritty third-liners the better. The new-age rules were supposed to promote offense and open-ice but coaches have found the way to get ahead of that curve just as coaches always focus on obstructing rather than creating.
There have been few individuals over the course of NHL history with a better understanding of defensive principles, work ethic and commitment to winning than Bob Gainey.
Yet envisioning the path down which the league was heading, he introduced a rule at the general managers’ meeting in October 2008 that would have required players to have at least one skate blade on the ice in order to legally block a shot.
An idea ahead of its time was laughed down and has never been resurrected.
The Rangers will have to find a way around the Caps’ bodies. You would think that a team so reliant on blocking shots would be able to come up with an antidote to the tactic, but not yet, the Blueshirts too unable to get the puck through when attempting to play against the equivalent of three goaltenders, and most noticeably so on the power play.
Penalty calls throughout the playoffs have been arbitrary, never more so late in games. But the fact is that the Rangers have been awarded 14 power plays in the third period and overtime while their opponents have been awarded seven, and the further truth is that the Blueshirts are 1-for-14 and the opposition is 2-for-7.
The team that has lived by the blocked shot is now faced with dying by the blocked shot. And a slow death it would be.