Thursday, January 15, 2009

Thursday Morning Cupcheck - How to Beat the Detroit Red Wings

By Todd Maternowski

Top of the morning, hockey fans! Last week we discussed moving the Winter Classic to Minnesota (rather than chump-on-a-rope cities like Boston and New York); this week, I was planning on writing my annual Things That Are More Relevant Than The All-Star Game column (#43: World's Greatest Grandpa mugs), but thanks to recent events in everyone's favorite hockey-flavored telenovella, El Mundo de Estrellas de Dallas, I was forced to slightly alter this week's list to Top Ten Things That Are Better Than the Detroit Red Wings.

Drumroll, please?

#'s 1 through 10: The Dallas Stars

Now I know what you're thinking: yeah, yeah, they beat them twice in three meetings, so what? The Stars are still like 22 points behind them in the standings. Suck it, cow-boy!. And you'd be partially right: the Wings are the class of the league, a team so talented and so tight that they don't just win games, they embarrass the rest of the NHL. Playing perfect positional hockey, never taking penalties, scoring highlight-reel goals two or three times per game, flawless defensive coverage... the Red Wings have it all.

On the other hand, hey look at this..

The old, slow Wings were exposed Monday night

The Stars let the Wings be Wings for one period Monday night, but then did everything you need to do in order to beat Detroit at their own game. The result? An astonishing two-period-and-overtime domination, in which the Stars launched 49 shots (75 if you count blocks and near-misses), gave up just a single highlight-reel improbable goal, and scored on the Wings seemingly at will despite the herculean efforts of goalie Chris Osgood --who had to be Chris Osgreat just to keep the Wings from getting completely blown out.

How did they do it? How did this ragtag bunch of misfits defeat the Evil Empire of Hockey? It's simple really: they played to win.

Naturally, it all started on defense. For one period, the only defender who bothered to show up was -shockingly- Nick Grossman. The young Swede was laying physical checks all over the ice, scored his first regular-season NHL goal (he had one in the playoffs against this same Wings team last year), and looked positionally solid. Unfortunately, our veterans, like Sydor, were completely pwned from the opening faceoff (although don't quite get on Sydor's case just yet: the Stars are 12-9-3 with him, while the Penguins have spiraled towards the Eastern Conference basement without him, going 10-16-2 since the over-the-hill Sydor came back to Dallas).

Stars announcer and mustache-god Darryl Reaugh has a ten-point checklist on how to be roundly embarrassed by the Wings, and just like last Thursday's debacle in Detroit, the Stars were well on their way to fulfilling their destiny as just another skidmark under the Wings' bandwagon. That is, until the start of the second period.

For the next 42 minutes, the Stars stopped letting the Wings skate unchallenged through the neutral zone, stopped launching pucks around the rims in the offensive zone, and stopped running around like headless chickens in their own zone. The result? Perhaps the most lopsided period of hockey domination in years for your Dallas Stars. If other teams watch and learn (the Sharks definitely will, the Ducks definitely won't), they will see the blueprint for defeating The Perfect Hockey Team.

The primary problem when playing the Wings is not their skill or speed, it's their flawless positioning. Watch a Red Wings game and count the number of times two Wings go to the puck when only one opposing player is near it. Go ahead, do it! You will probably end up at a number somewhere between zero and one. When a Wing gets possession of the puck, his teammates peel off and occupy large zones on the ice. And you will never see three Wings trapped behind their own net fighting for the puck, unless the other team has three of their own skaters back there as well.

The result? It seems as if the Wings have players everywhere. Throughout the game, the Wings play like they have six or seven guys on the ice, and the amazing frequency of no-look passes resulting in highlight-reel goals can seriously demoralize not just a team, but an entire fanbase. "Wow, check out that ridiculous level of skill": it's not skill, it's positioning!

Perfect positioning also leads to perfect defense. Ever see a team get the puck from the Wings, skate for ten feet then rim it around the boards behind Osgood/Conklin? Yeah? Ever see that team score more than a single "lucky" goal? No? Me neither. When you dump-and-chase against a team with superior positioning, you are essentially punting on first down. Ever wonder why the Wings take so many shots while giving up so few? Because teams give them the puck at every opportunity. Opposing teams play to lose, and --somehow-- they lose.

With the possession battle lost, most teams then fall into Panic Mode. Panic mode is characterized by your players skating around to where the puck just was a second ago, trailing the play and unnecessarily doubling up on any Wing that graciously holds the puck for longer than a split-second. This is usually where you see the tic-tac-toe passing ability of the Wings, followed by a demoralizing goal. And four times out of ten, one of those passes was a no-look pass to a position on the ice, rather than to an actual player. Again... perfect positioning. You hardly ever see the Wings go into anything even remotely resembling Panic Mode.

"Did someone say we could punt on first down?"

As you can see, things can get pretty ugly when playing the Wings. But the Stars came out after the first intermission and did what surprisingly so few teams do against Detroit: came out fearlessly, skated in waves, and came through the middle of the ice rather than the perimeter. The result was akin to the Jung Horde sweeping through an undefended village: four goals, four ridiculous saves by Osgreat to keep it to four goals, and a non-stop barrage of shots by the Stars. The ice seemed tilted, as the Stars skated downhill past the Wings' suddenly-exposed defense, and just as suddenly the Wings went from Super Skilled to Super Soft.

Trevor Daley, in particular, was flat-out awesome. Besides scoring the OT game-winning goal, Daley took it upon himself to make sure the puck stayed in the Wings' zone by skating it in there. The result was --voila!--puck possession for the Stars. The Stars opted to skate through the middle of the ice, and --ka-ching!-- 23 shots in one period on net. And the Stars decided to forget about the Fearsome Skill of the Wing forwards, instead playing with the same level of physicality as they would any other team, and --holy crap!-- they suddenly were winning puck battles in all three zones.

Ask any Red Wing: it's easy to win every puck battle and look like the most skilled player in the NHL when the other team respects your personal space. When they don't...well, suddenly your top two forwards are a 6th and a 7th-round draft pick ineffectively trailing the play. The Wings are without question one of the hardest-working, smartest teams in the NHL --but they're also the smallest. They have no true enforcers. They 'skate lightly'. Their forwards look ridiculous and out-of-place when they try to throw a jaw-shattering check. And an overly-physical team can beat them in a seven-game series: as long as the Stars, Ducks or Sharks play the way they can against the Wings, it's unlikely Detroit will make it to a second-straight Cup Final. Of course, last year the Wings' opponents tried to out-skill the Wings rather than punch them in their fat Swedish faces, and the result was the 2008 Cakewalk to the Cup. We'll see if anyone will learn from this game, especially the Stars.

That's it for this week's Detroit-bashing Cupcheck. Tune in next week when I release the results of my Lowjack Study, tracing the Fall migratory patterns of the Great Suck Monster --starting with the Texas Rangers, then on to the Dallas Averys, with a final Winter resting place at Valley Ranch. Let's hope it's hibernation period lasts at least until the start of Cowboys training camp.

Related stories

• Thursday Morning Cupcheck - The 2009-10 NHL On-Pace Awards (Oct. 8, 2009)
• Thursday Morning Cupcheck - Two Teams, One Cup (May 28, 2009)
• Thursday Morning Cupcheck - Second Round Bad Blood (May 14, 2009)
• Thursday Morning Cupcheck - Gary Bettman Hates the Detroit Red Wings (May 7, 2009)
• Thursday Morning Cupcheck - R.I.P. San Jose Sharks, 2005-2009 (April 30, 2009)

See more stories in:

• Hockey > NHL > Stars

Comments

Scott Doyle Verified

Awesome TMC (DbC?) this week, Todd!

I'm a relative nube to the hockeys, and I always wondered how the Wings managed to rain down shots on goal so efficiently. Very much appreciated.

9 months, 3 weeks ago ( Link to this comment | Suggest removal )