The next time someone tells you hockey's all about speed ... don't listen to them!
It's all about speed differentials.
Not to pick on the guy, but Kasperi Kapanen has all the speed in the world but struggles to consistently leverage it for offense.
Wonder why that is? Well, a big reason is that straight-ahead, one-dimensional speed is easy to defend.
In the Penguins' 3-1 win over the Sabres here at PPG Paints Arena on Saturday, Jake Guentzel showed exactly why speed differentials are so effective at breaking down defensive coverage when he sprung Sidney Crosby for his second goal of the night to essentially seal the game:
It all starts in the defensive zone with some superb hounding from Kris Letang to spark the play up ice. You can read more about Letang's night and return to the lineup here.
Once Bryan Rust fished the puck off the wall and dished it to the middle of the ice, Guentzel was looking at a 2-on-2 rush with Crosby as a likely best-case scenario.
The magic here is that Guentzel knew Crosby would be driving hard and through the middle of the ice. Because of that, Guentzel took several strides as if he were about to try and push the pace, only to pretty much come to a halt before he even reached center-ice.
This served two purposes:
1. If he continued skating forward, he would have run into the Sabres defender and likely had the puck swatted away. Slowing up created separation and gave him a larger radius to maneuver the puck.
2. By slowing up, the Sabres defender -- even if ever so slightly -- had to adjust their momentum and path to then try and maintain their gap on Guentzel instead of continuing to drift backward.
That tiny little adjustment by the Sabres defender allowed Crosby all the room he needed to split the defense and barrel into the zone and onto the loose puck as a result of Guentzel's area pass.
And of course, with the way Crosby's been going, he made no mistake putting it home.
It probably doesn't seem like much at a glance, but those are the kind of subtleties that go into manipulating the best defenders in the world.
