Terrific tandems lighting it up
Plenty of top-10 scorers have a star sidekick to set them up
Lindy Ruff fought the urge for as long as he could, but eventually he couldn’t take it anymore.
Down 2-0 to the Toronto Maple Leafs with time winding down in the third period, the Dallas Stars were desperately in need of a goal. So the team’s head coach went back to a familiar well and put Tyler Seguin back on a line with Jamie Benn. The two had combined for 146 goals and 326 points in the last two seasons, but have played apart for most of this year in hopes of giving the team a more balanced offensive attack.
“Both guys weren’t getting a lot done and I think there was a lot of attention paid to them,” said Ruff. “Since the separation, Jamie’s been over a point per game. It takes the other team’s top defensive pair and forces them to make a decision on who to cover.”
Loading up a line with the Stars’ two stars essentially achieved the same purpose as the Leafs found out earlier this week. On their first shift together, Benn lured a pair of defencemen to the front of the net, allowing Seguin to get open in the slot where he beat a screened Curtis McElhinney for his 20th goal of the season. Had they been together the whole game, the Stars might not have lost 3-1.
“Obviously, it’s pretty nice when you have chemistry with one guy that you can work with,” said Benn, who won the 2015 Art Ross Trophy as the league’s top scorer with Seguin as his linemate. “Since he got here, we’ve had success and it makes it a lot easier.”
In the words of the Rob Base hit, “it takes two to make a thing go right.” That certainly has been true of this year’s top scorers.
From Edmonton’s Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl (107 points combined, all stats before Thursday’s games) and Washington’s Alexander Ovechkin and Nicklas Backstrom (104 points) to Chicago’s Patrick Kane and Artemi Panarin (101 points) and Boston’s Brad Marchand and David Pastrnak (99 points), the best players rarely get it done alone. In fact, six of the NHL’s top 10 scorers have a linemate who is also in the top 25.
This isn’t exactly new. Wayne Gretzky had Jari Kurri, Brett Hull had Adam Oates and, from the time they first laced up their skates, Daniel Sedin has his twin brother Henrik riding shotgun with him. A major reason why Mike Bossy said he was able to score 50 goals in 50 games in 1980-81 was because he had Bryan Trottier unselfishly passing him the puck and also taking the attention away from opposing defencemen.
“I think talent is the starting point and then it’s a willingness of each of the players to be the best that they can be and adapt to each other’s style of play,” said Bossy. “Everyone on the line had a specific talent that meshed with the other guy’s. After that, it becomes a matter of working to each other’s strengths and making up for any weakness that anyone might have.”
A forward line consists of three players, but coaches generally treat them as pairs with a third player rotated in and out. It’s not always a matter of putting the two best players on a line together. It’s about finding two players who complement each other’s skill sets and make up for each other’s deficiencies. It’s putting a passer with a shooter, a two-way centre with a one-dimensional winger, two guys who click.
A lot of it comes down to chemistry, that difficult-to-define trait that only becomes apparent when it’s missing.
The best duos make it seem like they are cheating at poker. They don’t bang their sticks on the ice to call for a pass. They simply skate to an area on the ice where they know the puck is going to be.
“A lot of times Backstrom can read where Ovie’s going and what he’s thinking,” said Capitals head coach Barry Trotz. “They have a sixth sense on the ice together. It’s very similar to the Sedins.”
That being said, Trotz has broken up the duo here and there since he arrived in Washington. It’s not about balancing the offence. It’s about keeping things fresh.
“It’s like a marriage. Sometimes when you break them up a little they realize they miss each other,” said Trotz, laughing. “A weekend where you’re split up and the wife has a girls’ weekend and you have a weekend with the guys is essentially good for the marriage.”
Of course, not all marriages are successful. When Phil Kessel was traded to Pittsburgh, most expected he was going to play with Sidney Crosby and score 50 or more goals. But their styles didn’t mesh. Instead, the Penguins’ top three scorers — Crosby, Evgeni Malkin and Kessel — are playing on separate lines, forcing opposing teams to pick their poison in defensive matchups.
Toronto has spread out the offence in a similar way with top scorers Mitch Marner and Auston Matthews rarely sharing the ice. A big benefactor of that has been James van Riemsdyk, who after a down year is on pace to have the best offensive season of his career on a line with Marner.
“The IQ is the big thing for him,” van Riemsdyk said of Marner, whom he compared to Kessel. “Phil is an underrated passer and that’s a big part of Mitch’s game, as well as how they use their speed in the zone to stretch the defence back.”
As for Bossy, his favourite dynamic duo this season has been Montreal’s Max Pacioretty and Alexander Radulov. When asked why, he said it’s because each seems more concerned with making the other player better than padding his own personal stats.
“They seem to be adapting to each other and developing a lot of chemistry,” said Bossy. “Radulov makes plays like a centreman, but he’s a winger. You don’t see that very often. His prime area of success is as a passer and not a goal-scorer. You become a great duo (when) you want each other to have success, but at the same time you’re able to do things that might go unnoticed that might attribute to each other’s success.”