CRANBERRY, Pa. — Hockey's neutral-zone trap isn't nearly as much about checking as it is about cheese.
The cheese that just sits there on that slab of wood, tempting the mouse.
"They're just sitting there, waiting for you," Brian Dumoulin was telling me Tuesday after the Penguins' practice at the Lemieux Sports Complex. "They know what you want to do. They know you can't do it. And they're waiting for you to skate right into it."
See, that's the trap.
There's a strategic element, obviously, but there's also the psychological. The opponent doesn't attack. The opponent merely waits, already having plotted out all of the puck-possessing side's possible approaches up ice, already having a plan for each. And the aggressor has no choice, really, but to navigate the minefield, anyway.
As efficiency goes, it works if a coach had sufficient buy-in.
As entertainment goes, it's akin to watching PPG Paints dry, as we witnessed Monday night when the Penguins fell behind the Rangers by one, then watched Alain Vigneault's boys go all cryogenic on them in the third period.
Or, as Kris Letang blithely put it, "That's some fun hockey, eh?"
Oh, yeah. And get used to it. There's a rematch at Madison Square Garden on Wednesday, then two more trapping teams on tap Friday at Minnesota and Saturday at home against the Devils.
Given that reality, let's grab some No-Doz and dig into the sport's most dreadfully dull sight.
HOW IT BEGAN
The Wild didn't invent the trap, though it might seem that way since the franchise has been skating backward since birth. The trap was actually brought to St. Paul by Jacques Lemaire after he was done boring us all to death by winning the Stanley Cup that way in New Jersey.
But the Devils didn't invent it, either.
It was done, believe it or not, to the Canadiens' dynasty of the 1970s, the teams blessed with Guy Lafleur, Ken Dryden and Larry Robinson. Those guys needed to trap in the same way Fonz needed a nickel for the jukebox, but Scotty Bowman installed it, anyway, and the system was such a shock to the establishment that it would take decades to come up with an antidote.
Before Bowman, Swedish teams in the 1960s used the trap to try to slow the infinitely superior Soviet sides in international competition. The Soviets loved to pass, pass, pass, so the Swedes eschewed the standard attack on a puck carrier and instead took away all his passing options. When the Soviet player couldn't find an open teammate, he'd simply dump the puck in the attacking zone and forfeit possession. Or worse, try to pass to one of those covered teammates.
Because of this, elements of the trap remain today in Swedish hockey, even at youth levels, as players are preached the merits of defense coming first.
"Those smart Swedes!" Carl Hagelin playfully came back when I brought this up, tapping his temple.
Turning serious, he said, "No, if you look at Swedish forwards in the NHL, even today, they're all two-way guys like Nicklas Backstrom, Henrik Zetterberg. Just like Peter Forsberg, Mats Sundin."
Even Oskar Sundqvist, one of the Penguins' top prospects.
"Oskar's a great example," Hagelin continued. "You watch him play, and he's all about defense first. I think our players have been brought up that way over the years, and that started with those teams that played the Russians, I'm sure."
Going way, way back, the more complete hockey historians tend to credit the Maple Leafs of the 1920s and 1930s for truly creating the trap, presumably because those gents knew it would be only a matter of time before Toronto would never win anything again.
Sorry. Couldn't resist.
Bottom line: The Devils took the trap to new heights -- or lows, for those buying tickets -- and no outcries or rule changes or adjusted Xs and Os have been able to kill it. Some have pleaded over the years for the NHL to empower referees to call "illegal defense," the way the NBA did to outlaw zone defenses that were suffocating scoring. Nothing's ever come of it.
The trap is the cockroach in nuclear winter.
Or is it?
"The trap's been around as long as I have," Eddie Johnston, the Penguins' 80-year-old patriarch, told me from his standing as a former goalkeeper, coach and GM. "But you can beat it. Oh, absolutely, you can beat it. If you couldn't beat it, everybody would be doing it all the time, right?"
HOW IT WORKS
There are multiple variations to any strategy, and the trap is no exception. The most common is a simple 1-2-2 formation, where there's one pseudo-forechecker, two forwards behind him flanking to the left and right, and two defensemen basically munching on popcorn in the background. Some coaches allow it to be at least a little aggressive.
Others, such as the infamously inert Lightning of a half-decade ago, who, under Guy Boucher's orders, would just stand in the neutral zone and ... well, stand some more.
It was so bad that it led to one of the great moments in recent hockey history:
This was November 2011 in Tampa, and the Flyers were so sickened by the Lightning's style that, on their first defensive possession, per the plan, Chris Pronger took a D-to-D pass from partner Kimmo Timmonen and ... well, he stood there, too. Then he stood some more, just to make sure the embarrassment was sinking in before the Lightning's home fans.
It was then that poor Marty St. Louis, the lone forechecker, looked over to Boucher and shouted, "What should I do?"
To which the Flyers' Daniel Briere countered, "You'd better go forecheck him because we're not going to move!"
The referee finally blew the whistle, presumably for a dead puck. But the point was made.
Letang cited that Tampa approach on his own Tuesday, calling it the "1-1-2 1/2."
Here's how the standard 1-2-2 works: Think of the first forward as the tip of a triangle that focuses on the puck-carrier coming out of his defensive zone. That forward's primary job is to steer the puck-carrier, much more than to force him. The goal is to shrink the rink. The other two forwards in the triangle position themselves to try to cut off the puck-carrier's passing lanes, like the Swedes did to the Soviets. And the defensemen, they do the popcorn thing and wait to see how it all plays out.
If the puck-carrier has an ego, he'll see all those bodies standing still and find it terribly tempting to try to skate through. He'll almost never succeed, no matter his speed.
If the puck-carrier sees open mates well down the ice — and he will — he'll be tempted to Hail Mary the puck in that direction. He'll almost never succeed, no matter his precision, because of the quality of NHL ice or the general unpredictability that comes with such attempts.
Behold Dumoulin's intercepted breakout Monday night that led directly to New York's backbreaking fourth goal:
Dumoulin sees Sidney Crosby bursting up the middle, the most dangerous area of the ice against the trap. And what's not to like? It's Crosby, after all, and he's got the wheels going.
Well, the Rangers' Ryan McDonagh, one of the league's smarter defensemen, sees that, too. He jumps the route, to borrow a football term, does some rather elegant gliding after the pick, then sets up Kevin Hayes for a tap-in.
"Their guy made a really good read," Dumoulin told me regarding McDonagh. "I thought we had something there, and I definitely should have been more careful with it."
He was hardly alone. Watch this one a little later:
Letang goes back to retrieve the puck. The Rangers, rather than pressuring him, stay in their 1-2-2. Their first forward — Oscar Lindberg, a Swede, as fate would have it — is right in front of Marc-Andre Fleury's net, but he's clearly instructed by Vigneault to go no further. He's to wait for Letang to move to one side of the net or the other so that he — and the rest of the triangle — can shrink the right to that side. And like Boucher's Lightning, he'll wait all day if needed.
This is where the battle is lost. Letang hates the trap. It infuriates him, even hours before the Penguins are to face a trap team. And he decides to get overly ambitious: Rather than emerging and starting a real breakout, he spots Jake Guentzel all the way down by the New York blue line and puts up a prayer. Which, as usual, fails. The puck skips off the boards past Guentzel, who was easily covered, anyway, and the Penguins are whistled for icing.
That's the trap. There isn't much more to it.
HOW TO BEAT IT
Other than beating it, of course.
Let's swing back to EJ, who illustrated his preferred trap-busting technique by running his finger across a cement-block wall, symbolism sold separately.
"You've got to get the puck to the other side. That's No. 1," he began. "What they want is for you to stay on one side of the rink. It's easier to defend. It's easier to force a mistake. So you've got to get it across."
The easiest way is that D-to-D pass. The right defenseman goes across to his partner, or vice versa. And with that alone, they force the trapping triangle to move more than it wants. They allow for at least a patch of unwanted chaos.
"Just change the picture," Dumoulin said.
From there, it's incumbent on the forwards to come back further than the norm to account for possible mistakes. It's more of a pack-mentality breakout.
"Everybody has to kind of swing back and come up the ice closer together," Marc-Andre Fleury said. "Maybe you have to make a couple more passes. But you're there if something goes wrong, too."
Once in the neutral zone, the Penguins' focus is the hard diagonal pass. And it had better be hard. You've got to have skill at both ends of the pass to pull this off, but they feel they've got it. The defenseman moves the puck forward to his winger, and the winger very quickly sends it laterally to either his center or the other winger who's skating with speed behind the triangle.
Believe it or not, they did this pretty well Monday, particularly the Evgeni Malkin line with Phil Kessel and Guentzel. The Rangers really couldn't handle it at any stage.
"One good pass makes the difference," Matt Cullen said.
From there, the zone entry is ... typically a mess no matter what. Because those two defenseman finally put down their popcorn and go to work. Usually with heavy backchecking support.
"It's not going to be pretty," Letang said. "You're almost never going to get in there clean."
Which is fine. A team like the Penguins will get into trouble against the trap by trying too hard to be the Penguins and carry the puck. This happened in the playoffs at times, too.
But beating that wasn't complex, either.
"Chip and chase," Trevor Daley said. "You look for soft spots in their zone, and you put it there."
And then skate like heck?
"Skate like heck. Because once you get it back, it's just like you carried it in."
The other advantage to the chip-and-chase is that it exposes especially slow-footed defensemen like the Rangers' Dan Girardi. When he's allowed to operate comfortably in the trap, he looks like any other player because Vigneault puts him at center ice and has him go back barely half the rink for a routine retrieval. But when the Penguins push it past Girardi, as they did in the first period and all through the playoffs last spring, he's an enormous weak link.
Look for these and other adjustments from Sullivan and staff all week. The coaches put the players through an unusually heavy video session Tuesday morning, then reinforced it with practice drills that stressed those lateral passes.
And again, they were hard. Because the most improved area of the Rangers, in particular, is that they capitalize on turnovers in a hurry:
Finally, it's pivotal, once the attacking zone is gained, to keep possession. This is always true, of course, but as the Rangers demonstrated, they'll collapse on the middle, be satisfied to wait for a blocked shot or intercepted pass, then shoot themselves from a cannon the other way:
That's it. That's how to beat the trap.
On the ice, anyway.
If you want to beat it from your couch, just change the channel.
