Here’s the problem.  Until offense-first teams start winning consistently it’s stupid to try and enforce a losing strategy.  The NHL was a largely offensive league until 1994 when the Devils completely disassembled Detroit’s high powered offense, and it’s been defense-first ever since.  It’ll take a Bizarro-Devils revelation to change things back.

Sadly, there is simply no possible way for an offense-first team to be consistently Cup competitive in the current NHL environment.  None.  The cap prevents rich teams from loading up on highly skilled (and hence highly expensive) players.  The lowered RFA/UFA age means even if a team manages to draft a roster full of skilled offensive players (a galactic longshot) they likely won’t be able to keep them past the age of 25.

The only legitimate way to get teams trying to focus more on offense than on defense is to make scoring goals more attainable than stopping them is at the moment.  IMO the only real way the league could do that is by pretty dramatically increasing the size of he ice surface and thereby eliminating the effect of the currently-employed trapping systems.

Posted by HockeyinHD on 12/12/07 at 08:10 AM ET

If they want coaches and GMs to change their behavior, they should change the incentives.  Make Goals-Scored a deciding factor in playoff seeding and you might be able to re-prioritize scoring in this league.

Telling GMs and coaches to “look beyond their narrow self-interests” is stupid, though.  Good intentions don’t help them keep their jobs.

Posted by Earl Sleek on 12/12/07 at 08:42 AM ET

The trick, then, is to change the philosophy, and that’s not as complicated as it sounds.

But it IS just as complicated as it sounds.

You are trying to ask everyone involved in hockey, purely out of the goodness of their own hearts, to play a distinctly different (and often unsuccessful by comparison) style of hockey.  Altruism is all well and good, but it doesn’t help teams win, which means it doesn’t keep owners happy and coaches employed.

If you want a more attacking style of hockey, then the rules have GOT to be changed to favor it - appealing to fuzzy concepts of good will won’t cut it in a competitive business environment.

Posted by Baroque from Michigan on 12/12/07 at 12:08 PM ET

Make Goals-Scored a deciding factor in playoff seeding and you might be able to re-prioritize scoring in this league.

Tell the teams at the beginning of the year they have 82 games to pile up as many goals as they can, and the eight teams who score the most goals regardless of goals-against go to the playoffs. 

Posted by Baroque from Michigan on 12/12/07 at 12:12 PM ET

Ha Baroque, but they have to keep the goalie in the net!

Posted by Paul from Motown Area on 12/12/07 at 12:15 PM ET

Yeah, Baroque, I’d probably keep some stipuation about goals-against.  The top 8-scoring teams make the playoffs, provided they score more than they let in.  In the case where there aren’t eight such teams, then probably the ones that are closest to outscoring their opponents.

It’s still got some work, but I continue to promote the idea.

Posted by Earl Sleek on 12/12/07 at 12:43 PM ET

When half your teams are preoccupied with preventing goals instead of scoring them, you’re going to get dull, boring anti-hockey.

Aint that the truth.

I like that idea by Earl Sleek, as crazy as it sounds, it would leave coaches no choice but to attempt to score more goals.
There isnt enough high scoring games anymore, or shots on net per period, for either team.
And I can count on one hand the most entertaining periods of hockey my team has played so far this year.

Posted by PuckHound61 from Speckville USA on 12/12/07 at 12:48 PM ET

The good thing about promoting goal-scoring is it would take no effort at all to get the players to buy in.  Whenever two teams are skating back and forth, trading chances like crazy, and paying very little attention to defense you can count on a shot of the players on the benches enjoying the action and into the game, and the coaches looking constipated because the game is out of their control.

Posted by Baroque from Michigan on 12/12/07 at 01:48 PM ET

In an earlier posting, I’ve made the same point, so ignore this if you’ve been to Paul’s earlier post about “no more changes.”

I’m not an economist, but it pays to think like on in these circumstances. Economists are concerned with the incentives that people pay attention to and how these influence behavior. For the coach, the major incentive they operate under is collecting enough wins to keep their job.

EVERYTHING else, including the entertainment value of the product they put out, is a tertiary concern. It’s foolish to ask them to go against their rational self interest to experiment with an offensive style of hockey just because it will be more entertaining for the fans. No reasonable person will do this. The earlier post on this article is correct, the run-and-gun style is too inconsistent to win Stanley Cups (The Buffalo Sabres and Ottawa Senators are exhibits A and B in this argument).

Coaches have no incentive to make hockey more exciting. It’s up to the league to properly balance offense and defense. And, for many people, the balance has been tilted in favor of the defense since the mid-90s. It’s necessary to experiment (carefully, and at the minor league levels first) with ways to provide some advantages to the offense.

Posted by Jim from Idaho on 12/12/07 at 03:14 PM ET

So the league is in trouble because the Kings suck and can’t protect a lead?

Posted by Pat on 12/12/07 at 03:36 PM ET

We’re reaching a point where we can do a couple of things to the game to promote offence.  We can continue to tweak and tweak and tweak, and watch coaches adjust, adjust, adjust, or we can attempt to change coaches’ attitudes in believing that it’s only defence that can be taught, because offensive skills must be innate.

As I stated in a response to the Is Kukla Cookoo? post, there is nothing that advanced scouting cannot break down, there is nothing that coaches and players can’t adjust to, and as long as 80% of the shots taken cause the puck to rise less than 12 inches off the ice, we could have 2-1 games with soccer-sized nets in a few years if the media’s demand that 9-8 games and only 9-8 games (as opposed to games with flow and scoring chances, regardless of the number of goals scored) are entertaining is seriously considered by the hockey operations department.

I have no problem with the concept of a little R & D, as suggested by Darcy Regier, but if coaches and players still refuse to believe that players can develop offensive skills at the NHL level, we’re in a lot of trouble.

Tomas Holmstrom spends 10-20 minutes after practice, every practice, tipping pucks.  The pucks he doesn’t tip, he tries to retrieve.  He makes sure to pay attention to where he is in relation to the net, and when he can convince a defenceman or goaltender to join him while his teammates try to ham it up by scoring top-shelf goals (or shooting at Homer’s head), he’s developing skills.  Just like Pavel Datsyuk and Henrik Zetterberg’s play-wrestling keep-away games form the basis for their ability to steal pucks and protect pucks in one-on-one battles along the boards.  Just like Mike Babcock has been able to make the entire Red Wings team “faster” in terms of pace of play and even speed, despite the fact that the personnel changes have been less than earth-shattering over the last three seasons. 

Developing offensive skills is just like perfecting trap hockey--it takes work.  But coaches and players don’t believe that some schmoe who came into the league barely able to skate can become one of the best net-front players, shot-tippers, and puck-retrieval experts in the league because of 10 or 20 minutes’ worth of practice each day.  They believe that it’s much more likely that you can teach Marian Gaborik and Pavol Demitra to play the trap instead.

Posted by George James Malik from South Lyon, MI on 12/13/07 at 05:17 AM ET

Over-coaching by uninventive minds is the heart of it then?

One of the things that has always struck me about sports is the constant recycling of the same coaches over and over, and an apparent terror of bringing in anyone different in case it doesn’t work out.  If a known name doesn’t work out, at least you get a pass because so many other teams made the same mistake.  I wonder if that adds to the calcification of strategy that some teams seem to have, even though they haven’t had success with the strategy.

I would think myself it would be easier to get a player to work harder to score goals than to play the trap.  Everyone likes to score goals - almost everyone plays defense, but out of a sense of duty unless he actually is a defenseman.

Posted by Baroque from Michigan on 12/13/07 at 07:12 AM ET