Caught in a trap: almost every team in the NHL has implemented a "system," but what exactly does that mean?

Hockey Digest, Jan-Feb, 2004 by John Kreiser

"I don't see it as a defensive system," says Yashin, who was often ripped by Stirling's successor, Peter Laviolette, for his defensive play. Laviolette eschewed the trap in favor of puck pressure--often despite entreaties from his own players to switch to a defense-first system. "You can still create a lot of offensive chances if you do everything right. We're still learning how to play it, but if we learn how to score off the transition, we'll have more than enough chances."

The Trap Revived

The current trap and its derivatives" began to take hold in the mid-1990s, when expansion diluted the NHL's talent base and coaches of some of the new teams began to wonder how they could compete with teams that had a lot more offensive skill. The answer turned out to be simple: If you can't outgun more-talented teams, slow them down with a system that minimized the effects of talent and maximized the impact of hard work and positioning. Clogging up the middle of the ice, legally or illegally (depending on your view of all the hooking, tugging, obstruction, and holding that was going on), enabled teams whose rosters didn't contain names like Gretzky and Lemieux to compete (and often beat) those that did.

The Florida Panthers were the prototype for this kind of trapping team. Coach Roger Neilson knew that he wouldn't get much offensive talent in the expansion draft. But there were some talented goal-tenders and hard-working checkers available, so the panthers nabbed John Vanbiesbrouck to play goal, then filled out their roster with players of limited offensive skills whose biggest attribute was their willingness to work hard.

The formula worked: The Panthers barely missed the playoffs in their first season, and, with Doug MacLean behind the bench, reached the Stanley Cup Finals in their fourth. Said Vanbiesbrouck at the lime, "People can say what they want about the trap, but we're a humble team."

By then, though, the New Jersey Devils had shown that elite teams could trap effectively, too. Jacques Lemaire brought the trap to New Jersey in 1993 and took a team that had been spinning its wheels for years to an overtime loss in Game 7 of the Eastern Conference finals. A year later, the Devils were champions, having trapped their way to a sweep of the Detroit Red Wings.

Lemaire's early teams made life miserable for opponents by forcing turnovers and converting them into goals. His first team averaged well over three goals a game, and the Cup champions scored 16 goals in sweeping Detroit. Lemaire left after the 1997-98 season, but under Robbie Ftorek and then Larry Robinson, the 1999-2000 Stanley Cup championship team and the 2000-01 Cup Finalists were among the highest-scoring clubs in the league.

But by then, goal-scoring was becoming a lost art. A league that had seen an average of 8.03 goals a game in 1981-82 and 7.24 per contest in 1992-93 began to suffer from a scoring drought [See chart, page 53.] Goals per game fell to 5.97 per game in 1994-95 and kept falling--they've hovered between 5.24 and 5.54 for the past six seasons, despite efforts by the NHL to put more offense into the game by tinkering with the size of the neutral zone and the area behind the nets, mandating annual crackdowns on obstruction fouls, and, this year, keeping a closer eye on the size of goaltenders' equipment.