Weekend wrap: Thornton, Neal, Islanders, Jets and more

A look at three of the biggest stories from the NHL weekend and how they’ll play into the coming days.

Another Black Eye

The weekend included plenty of important games and individual highlights. But those won’t be the focus today, because as seems to be the case a few times every season, the hockey world is instead left reflecting on yet another scary incident of needless violence.

This time it came in Saturday's game between the Penguins and Bruins. The teams have a long history with each other, and their recent matchups have featured plenty of bad blood. But Saturday’s game went well beyond that, and it left both teams facing down injuries and suspensions.

The lowlight was Shawn Thornton’s outright assault on Pittsburgh defenseman Brooks Orpik midway through the first period. The Bruins tough guy grabbed Orpik from behind, slew-footed him to the ice, then delivered a series of punches to his defenseless opponent. The attack knocked Orpik out cold, and he was eventually stretchered off the ice.

Thornton was targeting Orpik after the Penguins defenseman had KO’d Boston’s Loui Eriksson with an open-ice hit on the game’s first shift. The hit was a shoulder into the chest and wasn’t penalized, though it was hard to tell if Eriksson had actually played the puck prior to contact. Thornton had tried challenging Orpik to fight, and when the invitation was refused he apparently decided he’d just have to jump him.

After the game, an emotional Thornton expressed regret. Earlier in the week, he had told ESPN.com that “People could probably criticize that I’m a little too honorable, I suppose, in some instances … If you’re one of those guys that suckers someone when they’re down or you go after somebody that doesn’t deserve it or isn’t the same category as you, that will come back and bite you at some point, too.” The quote sounds awful now, but he wasn’t necessarily wrong. Thornton has been one of the league’s more respected enforcers, in part due to his ability to actually play a little in between fights. That’s a reputation he was obviously proud of, but he’ll have to rebuild it from scratch.

The Orpik incident wasn’t the only ugly moment from a game so vicious that a slash that resulted in a broken ankle was treated as a virtual afterthought. Seconds before Thornton’s attack, Penguins winger James Neal appeared to intentionally knee Boston’s Brad Marchand in the side of the head while he was down on the ice. Although the result wasn’t as significant — Marchand was able to finish the game — you could argue that the act itself was every bit as bad as Thornton’s, if not worse. The NHL apparently doesn’t see it that way, though, as they’ve suspended Neal for just five games.

Thornton won’t be so lucky. He’s been invited to an in-person hearing, meaning he’s likely getting the book thrown at him. Anything less than a double-digit suspension would be a surprise, and it will be well deserved despite the usual efforts to blame the victim. (If Oprik had just dropped the gloves, the thinking goes, Thornton wouldn’t have had to sucker him.)

In the meantime, prepare for another week’s worth of debate over “The Code” and fighting’s place in the NHL, with the usual suspects on each side trotting out the same arguments they turn to every time something like this happens. For a league that insists the players can police themselves, the NHL sure gives us all plenty of opportunity to practice this tired dance.

The Bruins held on for a 3-2 win, not that anyone noticed.

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Zone entries: What they are, and why they may be more important than you thought

It happens dozens of times in any period of NHL hockey: An attacking player, usually a forward, carries the puck through the neutral zone. As he crosses center ice and bears down on the opposing team's blue line, defenders start to converge on him.

One of several familiar scenes probably plays out next. Maybe he carries the puck across the line. Maybe he fires it in deep. Or maybe he turns it over and they switch direction to do it all again 50 feet away at the other blue line.

For most fans, those moments aren't memorable or even especially interesting. They're just filler — the back-and-forth part of the game that happens in between the important stuff.

But as the hockey world slowly becomes more open to new ways of analyzing and quantifying what happens on the ice, those filler moments have become the focus for a shift in thinking about how teams generate offense. And it turns out that something as common and seemingly innocuous as a puck crossing a blue line may be surprisingly crucial to getting it into the back of the net.

We'll get to why, and what it means. But first, a bit of background.

The Basics

If a team has possession of the puck in the neutral zone and wants to get it across the other team's blue line and into the offensive zone, it essentially has two choices: control the puck (either by skating with it or passing it across the line to a teammate) or shoot it in deep and chase it.

Each play comes with its own advantages and disadvantages. Carrying the puck across the line is more difficult — defensive teams will clog the neutral zone, and defensemen will wait near the blue line to try to poke the puck away. It also carries higher risk; failing means attacking players can get caught out of position as the play turns the other way. But if a team can manage to do it successfully, it gains the zone with possession.

Shooting the puck in is safer. Other than the occasional fluke play where the puck hits someone on the way in, a shoot-in almost always results in the puck going deep. But then comes the hard part: Now you have to go get it, either by reaching the loose puck first or by taking it away from the defensive player who did. That's easier said than done, and often a dump-in ends in a change of possession. But if a team does manage to win back the puck, it will have control deep in the zone and may even be able to manufacture a quick chance off the turnover.

Is one option better than the other? We'll get to that. But first …

A Little History

Both approaches have been around for years, though the way coaches use them has evolved. The North American game has often favored the dump-and-chase, and has attached a kind of workmanlike ethos to it. Keep it simple. Dump it in, skate hard after it, bang and crash, and good things will happen. Don't go getting fancy.

That became especially true in the '90s, when variations of the neutral-zone trap began to infest the league. When executed well, the trap made it almost impossible to carry the puck through the neutral zone, let alone across the blue line. And in a league that had abandoned enforcing its own rules against obstruction fouls, the trap was usually executed very well indeed.

The end of the 2004-05 lockout brought several rule changes, one of which was meant to hamper the trap. The league eliminated the two-line pass rule, meaning teams could send the puck from their own zone to the other team's blue line with one pass. But while that did make the trap tougher to execute, two other rule changes combined to make the dump-and-chase an even more effective strategy.

First, the league added the trapezoid behind the net. That prevented strong puck-handling goalies like Martin Brodeur from acting as a third defenseman, retrieving the puck and firing it right back out before the attacking team could reach it.

And the league also decided to finally start calling obstruction again, which included an emphasis on defensemen holding up forecheckers. It used to be expected that one defenseman would race back for the puck while his partner ran a little interference on the attacking forwards. Nothing too flagrant, but a little pick here or a straight-arm there was part of the job. The NHL put a stop to that, which meant any defender who went back to gather a dump-in could now expect an opposing forward to be bearing down on him at full speed.

So, despite the game becoming faster and more wide-open after the lockout, dump-and-chase remained the strategy of choice for most teams. Which brings us back to the present day …

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Grab bag: No limts

In this week's grab bag: Albert arrives, Don Cherry won't leave, and the worst CBC montage ever.

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A brief history of NHL coaches behaving badly

It’s been a rough week for coaches in the world of professional sports. In the NBA, one was fined $50,000 for spilling a drink on the court to get a free timeout. In the NFL, the league is investigating a coach for stepping onto the field and interfering with a play.

By contrast, the NHL hasn’t had to fine any coaches in months [everyone warily eyes Patrick Roy]. Then again, it’s not as if the league can exactly gloat about how well mannered its coaches are. In fact, the league has a long history of meltdowns, tantrums, assaults, and flat-out cheating behind the bench. Here are 10 such notable incidents from NHL history.

Iron Mike Tries to Fight the Timekeeper

So Mike Tomlin might get fined for briefly stepping onto the field? Big deal. In the NHL, coaches charge onto the ice to try to pummel the official timekeeper.

Well, OK, not all coaches. Actually, only one: Mike Keenan, who attempted the feat back in 1990.

Keenan was upset over a disallowed goal, or perhaps simply mesmerized by that red-sweatered fan with the mullet and parachute pants. In either case, I think we can all agree that when Stu Grimson and Eddie Belfour are trying to calm you down, you may have taken things too far.

Jacques Demers: Change We Can Believe In

Littering the playing surface to get a free timeout? Nice idea, Jason Kidd. But as @geoffdes78 reminded me, Jacques Demers beat you to it by roughly 27 years.

Back in the first round of the 1986 playoffs, Demers and his St. Louis Blues were facing Minnesota in a hard-fought series. Three games in, North Stars general manager Lou Nanne leveled a stunning accusation: In each game, Demers had thrown coins onto the ice in an attempt to create a delay and rest his players.

Demers, being a man of unflinching integrity, quickly set the record straight: He’d only done it in one of the games, not three. “I just happened to be an honest person who didn’t deny it,” he told reporters.

That’s a good quote, but not the best line to come out of the incident. That was from Nanne, who said he assumed Demers was throwing pennies because “nickels would cost him too much.”

Demers didn’t end up having to spend any of his nickels on a fine; the league let him off with a warning.

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Weekend wrap: The inevitable crash-and-burn of the Toronto Maple Leafs

A look at three of the biggest stories from the NHL weekend and how they’ll play into the coming days.

The Stats Guys Are Happy, So the Leafs Must be Losing

Early in the season, we presented the 2013-14 Toronto Maple Leafs as the canary in the advanced-stats mine shaft — the ultimate test case of everything that hockey’s wave of new metrics and data-based analytics thought it knew about what drives success. We've learned the numbers point to the critical importance of possession. Teams that control the puck — and use that control to direct a lot of shots at the net — usually win. Teams that can’t do it usually lose.

But occasionally we see a short-term outlier, and last year’s Toronto team was one. The stats guys said they couldn’t keep winning that way. The Maple Leafs insisted that they could. And over the season’s first few weeks, it looked like Toronto was going to pull it off once again. Leafs fans rejoiced. Old-school media gloated. Celebratory T-shirts were, literally, printed up.

Those days suddenly feel like a very long time ago. The Toronto Maple Leafs are in a free fall.

Last Monday, the Leafs were humiliated by the Blue Jackets on their home ice, dropping a 6-0 decision. On Wednesday in Pittsburgh, they suffered the embarrassment of failing to get so much as a single shot after the second intermission. On Friday, they faced the dead-last Sabres in a battle of the two worst possession teams of the advanced stats era and lost again.

Saturday night brought yet another defeat, this time to the Canadiens. Montreal jumped out to a 4-0 second-period lead before a pair of Leafs goals made the final respectable, but this one was never really in doubt.

Leafs fans won’t want to hear it, but the math is actually pretty simple: If they can’t fix their shot clock issues, the Leafs will need historically good goaltending to win. They were getting that early on, and it helped them start the season 6-1-0. But in recent games, with James Reimer and Jonathan Bernier looking merely good instead of excellent, the Leafs seem overwhelmed. In their last 20, they’ve been under .500 at 8-9-3. They can’t score anymore. The defensive system is a mess. The coach sounds like he’s out of answers. And the season is slipping away from them.

Or maybe not. This could just be a cold streak, after all, the kind that every team hits at least once or twice over a long season. It’s worth remembering that while the Leafs have dropped from the top of the Atlantic down to wild-card status, they’re still four points up on the ninth spot. Plenty of teams would love to trade places with them.

So that’s the good news. The bad news is that the December schedule is absolutely brutal, including several games with the top Western Conference teams that the Leafs have mostly avoided so far. If they’re going to turn their season around, they’ll need to do it against the league’s best.

Oh, and this is the month that the HBO cameras show up. No pressure, guys.

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