When you reach the Stanley Cup Finals there is NO margin for error. Things that you can get away with in the earlier rounds or regular season, you can’t get away with in the finals. As I said in my last newsletter, the little things always matter…..
When I say little things, I might be a bit facetious but it’s the simple things that make hockey great. To me hockey is all about risk management. As a player on the ice, we look at the scenario we see before us and hopefully make the lowest risk play that benefits our team offensively or defensively. Hindsight and video review are easy to point mistakes out, however, when you get paid multiple millions of dollars to do things right, these small simple mistakes become critical. Last night was a perfect example of how things can go wrong fairly quickly.
Simple things such as communication, not treating the puck like a hot potato, making safe plays that nobody notices, identifying opponent players that present the greatest danger to our defensive structure, back tracking with actually picking an opponent player up etc. These little things can mean the difference to a quick transition or zone exit or a prolonged OZ time for our opponent against us.
Believe it or not, analytically, Game 1 between MTL and TBL was fairly close. Zone entries, zone exits, turnovers, board battles, face offs, high danger scoring chances etc. SO…. what led one team to a 5-1 victory over another? The TBL capitalized on MTL’s inability to control the little things, turning little mistakes into big goals against. It’s the little things that killed MTL last night.
To be fair, TBL looked in sync totally fired up and ready to go from the drop of the puck. MTL looked tired, a bit unprepared and they made many small mistakes that became significant blunders in terms of goals against. This started right from the opening face off.
Many of the errors related to a lack of communication between MTL team mates. Carey Price and his D corps, the D corps and the F’s. Price could have made several simpler and safer plays with the puck, D partners were not in sync. DZ coverage and back tracking were ineffectual mainly due to fatigue and poor decisions (MTL players not picking up high danger threats). These mistakes, at an earlier round may not have been significant, but now against defending Stanley Cup Champion TBL can’t happen Because, of the 10-11 even strength scoring chances TBL had, all were related to MTL mistakes and 3 ended up in the back of Carey Price’s net. Conversely, TBL made similar mistakes but paid attention to the little things to mitigate the damage.
MTL systems and structure were solid and don’t need to be changed. But executions within these systems have to significantly improve or this series will be over before it starts.
I said in my last newsletter, special teams may be the difference in this series. TBL scored 1 goal on 3 PP’s. I couldn’t have been more wrong…. Most of TBL’s goals were scored because of MTL not ensuring the little details were covered.
The link below is an annotated/telustrated link to 10 scoring chances against MTL along with explanations as to what I think went wrong.
The series is a long way from over! Please don’t hesitate to comment, love to learn!
TBL Scoring Chances - MTL little things mistakes
Thanks for reading!
JV