Defense-first hockey isn’t something new and Buffalo Sabres players enjoy facing it as much as fans enjoy watching it.
If the Buffalo Sabres and other offense-first teams have a bugaboo it comes from teams that thrive on bottling up the neutral zone and slowing the game to a crawl in their own demented defensive way.
The Sabres have gotten a long look at the 1-3-1 forecheck already this year and it’s a defensive scheme they struggled against last season and in a pair of games against the New York Rangers and New York Islanders they’ve shown that it’s just as frustrating as ever to deal with.
A season-opening home loss to the Rangers and a close road defeat to the Islanders highlighted their need to find other ways to attack a scheme that’s meant to take away their strengths of speed and skill.
Even discussing it is frustrating and for the players, they like going up against it as much as most fans like to watch it in action. Following the Sabres loss to the Rangers, captain Kyle Okposo was frustrated about how the team responded to seeing the stifling style of defense flummoxed them. Seeing it again days later against the Islanders prepared them for it, but ultimately it was the Isles taking two points.
“Well, we obviously have struggled against the 1-3-1 in the past and we got to figure out how to play a simpler game when we play it because we just overcomplicated it tonight,” Okposo said following the Rangers loss.
How it’s used now isn’t quite the anti-hockey it was in the late-90s and early 2000s, but its purpose is the same: Grind the game down and attempt to win low-scoring games. And if you turn the puck over enough and fall into the, ahem, trap, you get your doors blown off on the counterattack.
But while many teams are turning towards playing a high-octane kind of hockey that utilizes speed and skill to put opponents on their heels, there are still a few holdovers doing it the old way. That doesn’t mean players have to like it though.
“I don’t think you’re going to see a coach that hasn’t worked in the NHL in the last 10 years that’s going to come in and play that style,” Okposo told Noted Hockey. “It’s older coaches and it’s the way that the game used to be played. It’s super defensive. In my opinion, it’s hard to win a Stanley Cup that way now. Really hard.”
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Okposo’s experience is invaluable to his teammates and over the course of nearly 1,000 NHL games played, he’s seen it all and been part of teams that have tried it all. With age comes experience and wisdom and thinking about what he said there, he’s right.
“Look at the teams that have won, they’re basically a hybrid,” Okposo said. “They can play offense, they can score, but they can also lock it down. It’s really hard now to win games that way (super defensively) when you’re down the stretch. You’ve got to be able to score goals, too. But that has to be a foundational piece, too. I guess we’ll see if that sort of style can win.”
The ultra-defensive teams of recent memory who won the Stanley Cup (Los Angeles in 2012 & 2014) were able to suffocate teams with their defense, but it came from a forecheck that chased opponents as they started out from behind their own nets on breakouts. Getting on top of puck carriers immediately caused panic and rushed passes that went awry or onto the stick of Kings forecheckers. That forecheck turned into offense very quickly and eventually they raised the Cup twice because of it.
But teams that have gone defense-at-all costs have only made it so far. The Islanders were able to make it to the Conference Finals twice during the COVID-19 years and returned to the postseason last year after a one-season absence. A supreme defensively style with an elite goaltender to back it can cause a lot of headaches and that’s what the Islanders have with Ilya Sorokin and if the Rangers continue to play that way with Igor Shesterkin…the Eastern Conference is going to be a lot more annoying to play against for most teams.
“I mean, it’s not ideal if you want to play the get-up-and-go style, it’s pretty much completely contradicting,” Casey Mittelstadt said. “At the same time, there’s ways you can break it. You’re probably going to have to dump the puck in more and go forecheck more than you’d like. At the same time, if you’re able to get the first (goal) and get a lead against the trap and then you put them in a good spot where they’re uncomfortable and they’re chasing the game. It’s something they don’t do much or at least they try not to do so if you can break it and get the first one, the game opens up and, honestly, that can lead to more goals than you normally have. The hardest thing to do is get that first one.”
Hearing the classic buzz words about getting pucks in deep and being the first man in and all that can make your eyes roll with how common that solution is to fix what ails a hockey team. Let’s be serious, those phrases are used so often you’d think all hockey was just that simple to play and doing that consistently would mean having great success constantly. But when teams are greeting the puck carrier at their blue line and forcing them to pick a direction around them only to be greeted by another forechecker, lobbing the puck to the corner and going and getting it really is the best way to get in behind the opponents.
It stinks, it breaks up the speed, and it’s not fun to watch and knowing you have to prepare for potentially 60 minutes (or more) of that kind of hockey is a drag and a half. But it’s also a test of mental fortitude.
“That’s part of being a mature team is you have to be able to understand the game that’s in front of you,” Okposo said. “It’s a way different game against those teams if you score first, it’s totally different and then the game completely changes. And so that’s what you have to focus on is playing enough defense where you don’t give up the first goal. You just have to play structured, structured, structured. And then if you break through with one, then we can start to impose our game on them. And if it’s the other way around, you’re chasing the game and it’s predictably difficult. You just have to respect every opponent and the way that they play and try to break them open.”
Sometimes a lot gets made about how facing a 1-3-1 like what we’ve seen is a brand-new thing that’s completely foreign to the younger players. Oh-ho, that’s not true at all. Whether players have come from junior hockey or college, they’ve gone up against various types of defense-first systems meant to turn the game into a muck fight. It’s just a lot different when it’s coming from the best players in the world as opposed to lesser-talented opposition.
“In college it’s a different thing,” Mittelstadt said. “I don’t think I fully realized it yet, I was just kind of playing hockey, but I think the more you realize it, the easier it gets to play against and you can find ways to beat it… I think you improve on it over time, just like anything, like playing against a get-up-and-go style. In college it’s definitely harder. I think it’s hard when there’s 25-year-olds and you’re 18 and they’re sitting back trapping and cross-checking and you’ve got cages on, but you live and learn.”
Hockey involves collective learning like that and then trying to use that and apply it as you move forth through your career, just when you’ve reached the NHL it’s about doing that together as a team and applying those lessons to take down opponents. But for teams like the Sabres with a lot of younger players, getting to face off against these types of defenses now can get them better adjusted to the immense rise in difficulty that comes from being in the NHL. That kind of experience is absolutely necessary because it’s the kind of thing that can be best applied in the postseason when the rule book gets a lot shorter, and the games are a lot harder to play.
“It’s not a glamorous game,” Okposo said. “You’re not going to get six chances a game, most likely, as a line. So, you have to kind of grind it out and you give up two and get two. That’s the kind of a game that’s going be played and it’s going to
be a lot of ping-pong in the neutral zone. A lot of forechecking, a lot of skating. So, we just have to be comfortable in a game like that when a lot of young guys probably haven’t been in a situation like that.”