Game Three Recap (Penguins 4, Flyers 1)

After the Penguins beat the Flyers last night to take a 3-0 series lead, a Philly beat writer asked Flyers coach John Stevens if the Penguins were playing a neutral zone trap. Stevens spat out his reply as if responding to an expletive and said that was exactly what they were doing. So when they're not benefiting from incompetent officiating, the Penguins are employing a soul-destroying and game-deadening style of play. No wonder he hates them.

He's exactly wrong, of course. Sure, the Penguins were rocking the one-forechecker 1-2-2 for nearly the entire third period, but that's standard operating procedure in the Stanley Cup playoffs when you're protecting a late lead. But the system they played in the first two periods, before it was time to kill the clock, is not the neutral zone trap, and it's a bit of an affront to call it that. It's the same way they've been playing throughout the playoffs, it's the same way Michel Therrien was making the team's prospects play when he coached the farm team for two and a half years, and he brought the same style to the parent club in December of 2005. It's just that only now-- two and a half years after he was hired-- has the team bought into his system to the degree that they can consistently play within it. It hasn't come easily. He's had to come down hard in particular, at least in public, on the team's defensive corps, by first calling them out as a group in public ("I really think they're trying to be the worst group in the league," he lamented during his first partial season, the 05-06 debacle), and more recently by exiling Ryan Whitney and Brooks Orpik to separate gulags of playing wing instead of defense. So the team is playing extremely well now, but they're not playing the neutral zone trap.

We know a little bit about what it's like to play the trap. After being beaten by the trapping Devils in the '95 playoffs and the trapping Panthers in the '96 playoffs, the team figured if you couldn't beat 'em, then blah blah blah and hired Kevin Constantine to coach the team beginning in the '97-'98 season. Constantine's two years and change behind the bench weren't a total loss-- there was a playoff series against the Devils in '99 that ranks as Jaromir Jagr's best playoff performance-- but the defensive style the team played was bland given the skill of the (mostly European) roster, and when the team got off to a lousy start, it was easy to make the trap the scapegoat. The team brought in Herb Brooks to pick up the pieces, and his comments about what he hated about the way the team was playing were pretty telling. The interwebs are failing me here in finding the link, but Herbie specifically said that what he hated about how the Penguins were playing under Constantine were that (1) the team never wanted to have the puck, and how can you score when you don't have the puck? and (2) that the team wasn't skating, and the object of the game was to skate.

How do I know you're not a neutral zone trap? Well, because if a neutral zone trap is about puck dispossession and non-skating, those are the last two adjectives you'd use to describe the 2008 Pittsburgh Penguins. It's a shame no one keeps a stat on puck possession. I'd love to see what sort of time-of-possession numbers the Penguins are putting up this postseason. Sure, it'd be tough to do, but watching just a period or two makes clear that the Penguins are a team that wants to possess the puck just about everywhere on the ice. They want it, and they want to keep it for as long as possible. Maybe that sounds ridiculously obvious, but in the modern NHL, it isn't. There are lots of bad things that can happen when you have the puck-- you can make a bad pass or have it swiped away from your stick and give up a scoring chance to the other team. One well-trod path to success for several teams has been to play a style that de-emphasizes puck possession and concentrates on making the other team possess the puck under the worst of circumstances by clogging the neutral zone passing lanes, forcing turnovers and looking for odd-man breaks. When teams that play that style come into possession of the puck where there's no layup opportunity, they dump-and-chase or make some other low-percentage play, and if it results in the other team regaining possession in their own end, so much the better to try to force another turnover. That's not this team; they know they can win if they keep the puck all game long, and they have the confidence in their passing, puck-possession and protection skills to keep it up. It's a style of play that requires making safe plays, lots of skating and relentless backchecking and forechecking, and it's a lot of fun to watch. The highlight video you can assemble from the '07-'08 Penguins probably isn't as thrilling as the one you'd get from the '92-'93 squad who scored like a Sega team, but the attention to detail is really worth appreciating. It takes talent to execute it, of course, but it also takes coaching.

Like every hockey coach who has ever lived, Michel Therrien has lots of detractors. They're mostly quiet now in light of the team's success, but they'll be back when the team loses a few games or starts slow next year or can't win in Nashville in January. For lots of the young Penguins who played under Therrien in the minors, he's effectively been their only coach in the pros, and it's clear that they buy into what he's saying. He's saying it in a fairly endearing form of mangled Frenglish, but when the Penguins hire a coach, we expect there will be communication issues.

After falling behind 3-0 in the series, the Flyers may be in a trap, but they're not being trapped. And appropriate to the 3-game lead, there are three things that stand out from Game Three. First, Marian Hossa's first goal-- the one being celebrated above-- on a seeing-eye shot off the rush that showed just how flatfooted Martin Biron and the team playing in front of him have been. Second, when Philly's Mike Richards-- who is entering Ron Francis territory with his two-way play-- stole the puck from Ryan Whitney at the point and swooped in for a momentum-changing short-handed chance only to have Sergei Gonchar hustle to get back and dive to knock the puck off his stick at the precise moment when he could both avoid a penalty and disrupt the scoring chance. It was a fantastic play from a guy who has been maligned at times for his defensive work. And last, the egregious Steve Downie turnover that led to Ryan Malone's goal to ice the game. Downie's made some costly rookie mistakes, but Stevens put him in the lineup twice hoping he'd make a hit or two. Oh, he can do that. He put a nice hit on Petr Sykora right about the time Ryan Malone and Evgeni Malkin were raising their hands to celebrate the goal. Contrast Downie with the Penguins' Tyler Kennedy, an undersized third-line plugger who never stops skating. Both are rookies playing in their first playoffs, but Kennedy makes the smart plays, never hurts his team and gets the occasional rush or check or Upshall-beating. The writers who get paid will say the difference in the series has been the Penguins' stars or the Flyers' injuries or the inconsistent officiating, but it's really as simple as the difference between Steve Downie and Tyler Kennedy.