PREDATORS ARE ON THE PROWL
Ducks hope relentless style can’t last
Cam Fowler figured they would run out of gas. They had to — no one can sprint up and down the ice, always sending two forwards deep on the forecheck, always blitzing defenceman up in the neutral zone, always going full speed for 60 minutes.
“I think it’s hard to sustain,” the Anaheim Ducks defenceman said. “It takes a lot of effort to play that hard.”
Most teams, even in an era of the 40-second shift, pace themselves. If they don’t, the tank empties in the third period and players start to tire. When that happens, mistakes are made and you start giving up goals.
But in Game 3 of the Western Conference final, the Nashville Predators never took their foot off the gas. They never stopped pressuring the puck carrier or challenging each and every pass. They never gave an inch of space. They just kept going and going, like a team full of Energizer Bunnies.
Nashville outshot Anaheim 17-9 in the first period and 11-4 in the second. By the end of the game, it wasn’t the Predators who ran out of gas, but rather the Ducks, who gave up two goals — not including the two that were disallowed — in the third period of a 2-1 loss.
“I thought that our hockey club was flat with emotion, and you’ve got to give the opposition credit for taking that out of us, too,” Ducks head coach Randy Carlyle said. “There was frustration because of their aggressiveness and them playing in our face, and then we weren’t allowed to execute at the level that we have been accustomed to.”
There are many ways to win a hockey game. Some are more pleasing to the eye than others. While the Ottawa Senators have been criticized in the playoffs for sitting back and playing a boring, trap-style system, the Predators are playing as though they are concerned with putting on a show as much as picking up the win.
“It’s been our identity and it’s the way we want to go about our business,” said Predators forward James Neal, who credited head coach Peter Laviolette for introducing the system.
“It’s really paying off so far right now.”
This is a fun team to watch, even if it requires fans to wait for the whistle before they can blink. The defencemen are encouraged to play like forwards, the forwards are encouraged to play like heat-seeking missiles and the team has accepted the fact that they will always be out of breath.
P.K. Subban called it a “dogon-the-bone mentality.” The Predators play hungry hockey. Unlike the Senators, they are not trying to lull their opponent into sleep and then attacking. They are constantly putting opponents on their heels, like when Nashville lost a faceoff in the offensive zone late in Game 3, but still came away with the tying goal after Filip Forsberg chased Sami Vatanen behind the net and checked him off the puck.
“We want to dictate the pace of the game and we want to attack you in all three zones as a fiveman unit and be tough to play against,” Subban said. “I think everybody on our team can skate, move the puck and make plays, but I think the difference for us is the ability for us to get in there and challenge teams physically and really move our feet to check and defend.”
It helps that the Predators, who became faster when Subban replaced Shea Weber on defence, have the horses to play a skating game, and that they have a goalie in Pekka Rinne who can clean up any messes made on a bad pinch. But it’s more than just having players who can skate: It’s having players who are willing to come to the bench gasping for breath after every shift.
Most teams could play this way if they really wanted to, but most teams aren’t willing to play a full-court press for the entire game because it takes so much out of you.
“You’ll see teams do that over the course of the season, but they’ll do it for stretches at a time,” Fowler said. “It’s pretty rare to see a team that expects their players to do that for the whole 60 minutes — and that’s what they do. They obviously feel like they have the players and the speed to do that. It’s effective. It’s hard to play against.”
It’s effective, but it’s not infallible. Constantly attacking puts you at risk of being out of position or chasing the game. The challenge for Anaheim is to use Nashville’s pace against them and move the puck quicker than the Predators can move their feet.
It sounds easy, but when the decision-making process goes from one second to half a second, making the right play when you’ve got a player charging at you can be nearly impossible — even more so at this time of year, when the ice is soft because of rising temperature and the puck is bouncing like a tennis ball.
“I think we need to do a better job of making plays under pressure,” Fowler said. “There were times when we made a couple of plays and before you know it, then you can get them spread out because their first two forwards are so aggressive. If you make a couple of plays, there’s a lot of ice there to take advantage of.”
For now, don’t expect the Predators to slow down, and if you’re watching the game, don’t expect many opportunities to blink.
We want to dictate the pace of the game and we want to attack you in all three zones as a five-man unit and be tough to play against.