EXCITEMENT EVEN COACHES CAN’T CONTAIN
NHL’s new 3-on-3 overtime promises fast-flowing, mistake-filled finishes
Maybe the best thing about this National Hockey League preseason, for those fans not treated to a McDavid or an Eichel, will be watching teams work out strategies for 3-on-3 overtime. For some, it sounds simple. “Give it to the twins,” said defenceman Chris Tanev, summarizing the Vancouver Canucks’ probable Plan A.
For coaches, especially certain control freaks, which is most of them, it will be?
“Absolute chaos,” said St. Louis Blues’ Ken Hitchcock.
Goalies — who will have played 60 minutes only to get to a fiveminute session of river hockey that will make the shootout feel like a day at the beach — are apt to hear a chorus of caught-up-ice teammates shouting: “Spread out!”
“What I experienced last year was kind of a gong show, almost,” said Canucks’ backup goalie Jacob Markstrom, whose spectacular play with the team’s AHL affiliate in Utica, N.Y., was almost enough to win the Calder Cup.
“It’s like 2-on-1, then 3-on-1 the other way, then 2-on-0,” he said. “I think the forwards loved it, actually. But it opens up a lot of space, and if you have possession of the puck it’s a lot of fun to play 3-on-3. It’s not so fun to chase it.”
The NHL’s boldest format change since the 2005 adoption of the decreasingly popular shootout is coming to a rink near you, thanks to an experimental season in the AHL that produced a 75 per cent success rate at breaking ties during the overtime period.
Meaning only 25 per cent of OT games had to be settled by the skills contest.
The NHL model won’t be exactly the same one used in the AHL, where teams played up to seven minutes of extra time, starting 4-on-4 and going to 3-on-3 at the first whistle after the threeminute mark.
Pushed by the players’ association, the NHL decided to skip the preliminaries and go directly to the fire-wagon portion, with only two caveats: a team that takes a penalty won’t have to play with fewer than three skaters; the power play team will get to add one. And if a team pulls its goalie in overtime and loses as a result, it will forfeit the “loser point.”
Leaguewide over the past two years, one in every four NHL games has gone to overtime. So learning how to excel at it is apt to pay huge dividends for the teams that do it best.
“First of all, these points are going to be valuable,” Hitchcock said, during a coaching meeting with his staff aired on the Blues’ website.
“But the second thing that came up for me, watching scrimmages here with the prospects, was that a minute, minute-30, the games were over. Done.”
Hitchcock went so far as to appoint assistant Ray Bennett to devote a portion of his time solely to the task of analyzing and strategizing 3-on-3.
Other observations out of the Blues’ meeting:
Brad Shaw: “There’s faceoff plays that work only on 3-on-3 — defencemen have to take faceoffs, possibly, so they need to do faceoff work — I think you’re only going to use six forwards and three defencemen. Maybe not even six (forwards).”
Hitchcock: “There’s a huge strategy here. Your attitude, the way you want to play, how much you want to attack, how many guys you use and where you send your players from the bench, because all the goals got scored on poor line changes. The guy just couldn’t get off the ice. There was a little mistake entering the zone, the back guy couldn’t get off the ice, it was a 2-on-0, 2-on-1 and the game was over.”
The Canucks haven’t gone that deep into it yet, or if they have they’re not revealing much of their thought process.
“It’s something we’ll be working on from here until the season starts,” said head coach Willie Desjardins. “I think it’s good that the NHL put in a rule where there’ll be (three games) that you’ve got to play it, and hopefully there’s more.”
Vancouver GM Jim Benning said the advent of 3-on-3 “went into our thinking, too, in adding speed.”
That wouldn’t seem to be up the Sedins’ alley, but Benning is pretty confident the twins will figure it out in a hurry.
“They’re so smart in their positioning on the ice, and have that sixth sense to know where the other twin is at all times,” he said. “I see them excelling at 3-on-3.”
But until teams put it to the test, it’s all guesswork.
“You might as well go for it,” said Hitchcock, “and find some form, with organization, some form of attack mode. Two steps means a big deal here. The wrong two steps is a 2-on-0 break the other way.”
Best of all, it will look like a hockey game. A crazy, mistakefilled hockey game that coaches will have a hard time pounding into a form-fitted straitjacket.
It can’t come soon enough.