Fore Lines

    

     Hockey players love golf, as a rule. It makes sense. After all, both games involve hitting small objects with long sticks, aiming for a goal. Both provide opportunities to hang out with buddies and both can be competitive.

    In golf, however, there are options. Depending on conditions and ball placement, a golfer can choose a wood or iron, driver or putter, even a wedge. In hockey, players just have the one set of tools to use, which means if the situation changes from game to game, the only adjustments they can make is in their style of approach.

    The Montreal Canadiens are rapidly developing into a very exciting young team. They're fast, skilled and energetic. Most nights, that combination either leads to a win or at least keeps them in the game with a chance. In other games though, a big stifling defence or hermetic forecheck finds them frustrated and stymied. 

    The pure, pretty game they typically play requires open space and clean passing. When those defence-oriented teams take up that space and block the passes, the Canadiens don't have an answer.        Yet.

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    Just as a golfer has a variety of clubs to choose from, a hockey team needs a variety of games. Right now, the Canadiens can play offence with anyone. What they need as they develop is to learn how to change up their approach in order to respond to a different kind of opposition.

    In the recent game against Detroit, for example, the Wings were on top of the Canadiens' puck carriers as soon as they received a pass, giving them few options to make a play. The Detroit defence was in every shooting lane and their backcheckers successfully kept the Habs shooters to the outside, frustrating their attempts to make the pretty, exciting plays for which they're becoming known. Hemmed in and forced to play a more grinding game, they ended up taking a bunch of penalties, which kept guys like Cole Caufield who don't work the PK off the ice for significant stretches.

    The game, in short, was boring as a three-hour sermon.

    It's not the style the young, talented Habs want to play, or practice playing.

    That's not fair to them or to the fans who love exciting hockey, but in a parity league some teams without the talent to compete will grind instead.

    The Canadiens, unfortunately, have to learn to be responsible and boring when the occasion requires it.                  

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    Of course, learning to deal with different styles of opponent is more than possible. Take Juraj Slavkovsky as a brilliant example. Remember when he first started in Montreal? He obviously had skill or he wouldn't have been drafted first overall. Yet, he spent at least a third of his time either being knocked on his butt or getting up from being knocked on his butt. He had impressive size and strength, but he lost a lot of his board battles because he didn't have the balance or technique to win them.

    Slavkovsky, like many of his teammates was always the star of his youth teams. He didn't need to employ his physical gifts outside of using them to score goals. He had to adapt at the NHL level, and boy, has he done that!

    Today, the kid is a machine. He uses his size to muscle opponents off the puck. He punishes them in the corners and along the boards. And he drives the net with a power that's tough to stop. His evolution has been impressive and inspiring. It's a path his talented teammates must follow as well.

    Not every guy has the same physical abilities as Slavkovsky, but the mindset he's adopted is what's important. There will be nights when teams like the Wings or the Blues a couple of weeks before, will shut down the lanes and generally disrupt the finesse game. Those are the nights when passes have to get shorter, possession must be fiercely contested on the boards and defencemen (with the possible exception of Lane Hutson, whose game seems to transcend whatever the opposition does) play a tighter, more conservative game.

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    Sure, we won't see as many breakout stretch passes or dramatic odd-man rushes in games like that. However, come playoff time, learning how to play a tighter, more boring game will serve them well. The mark of a true contender is a team's ability to shift styles from game to game, or even within a game, to give the opponent the understanding there's nothing they can do to beat this team.

    As the great Ken Dryden wrote in "The Game" when describing the powerhouse teams of the '70s, 

    "Fred Shero's Flyers, a good, but limited team, needed a system. To be effective, they had to play just one way and to play that way so well they could overcome any team. Bowman's team is different. Immensely talented, immensely varied, it is a team literally able to play, and win, any style of game. For it, a system would be too confining, robbing the team of its unique feature: its flexibility. Further, Bowman understands, as Shero did, that the flip side of winning with a system is losing by that system."

    With the right coach and the right players, Dryden's Canadiens evolved into that immensely varied team, and Martin St.Louis' Canadiens must do the same thing if they're to be competitive for a long time.

    Once they get it, the rest of the league will have no choice but to let them play through. 

    Fore!