Canucks = Devils????
This one made me wonder when I first read it….but recently Ottawa coach Bryan Murray made an interesting remark about the Vancouver Canucks adding “they are the New Jersey of the West…they trap you to death.” Vancouver suddenly goes on a winning streak that features better defense and franchise goaltending from Luongo and automatically the New Jersey tag gets placed upon them, fairly or unfairly for both franchises.
A further look says otherwise. The Canucks employ a style that forechecks aggressively and attacks more from zone to zone to zone. Often the Canucks will send 3 or 4 forecheckers into the offensive zone on a dump-in. If anyone follows college basketball at all….they call it the press….a team from Arkansas called it “40 minutes of hell”…that is what the Canucks play. It is an up tempo game that relies on Luongo to be the last line of defense more times than not. The Canucks counterattack from any zone on the ice and that is a big difference.
The New Jersey “trap”, if you will, also relies heavily on Brodeur being the last line of defense. However, more often than not, the Devils play a more reliable form of defense that does allow less breakdowns for the most part. The two scoring lines do most of the countering while the fourth line is more for energy. On the fourth line, the two defenseman almost always stay at home. While in Vancouver, one is almost always in the play. Notice the counterting is only done by the Devils in mostly the neutral zone…hence the dubious name “neutral zone trap”. The minute an official utters the word trap in the NHL….you can hear Gary Bettman trying to figure out what to do about it to stop it.
The Devils’ system doesn’t work without Brodeur as does the Canucks’ system without Luongo but both teams use different meanings to come to the same end. So are they the same? The answer is no, perception is not reality in this case.
