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Alterations suit Stars just fine Aggressive forechecking pays off with Game 2 victory
Posted: Wednesday May 17, 2000 09:14 PM
By Al Strachan, SLAM! Sports DENVER -- The Dallas Stars, like every other team still alive in the National Hockey League playoffs, utilize a basic 1-2-2 forechecking pattern. Or so they will tell you. But there comes a time when basic play is no longer enough, a time when the caution that has been the team's trademark is jettisoned like used gum. The 1-2-2 calls for the first forechecker to head deep, the next two forwards to hang back a bit to see what develops, and the two defencemen to play their normal position. But what the Stars used to defeat the Colorado Avalanche on Tuesday night was more of a 3-0-2 -- a full-scale, damn-the-torpedoes, high-pressure forecheck. "Well, I think that game was very desperate for us," said an almost apologetic coach Ken Hitchcock, normally one of the league's more demanding taskmasters when it comes to defence-first positional play. "We couldn't go into their building down 0-2." Now, the Stars won't have to. The Western Conference final is tied 1-1 and the Avalanche may well be missing its top three defencemen in the next game. They almost certainly will be missing two. So if the Avs thought they were under pressure on Monday, wait until Game 3 Friday. The combination of the success of the high-pressure forecheck and the depletion of the Colorado defensive corps virtually guarantees a renewed assault. "They have some banged-up players now, just like we do," Hitchcock said. "We have to go after them with the same mind-set. We have to get on them and be physical. That doesn't change just because you are on the road." There is a very good chance Colorado's Ray Bourque may be back from the knee injury he suffered May 1, but by the 10-minute mark of the first period, he may be wishing he wasn't. If, as expected, both Sandis Ozolinsh and Adam Foote are missing, Bourque might as well replace his No. 77 with a target. The Stars will be swarming him like lawyers on a disaster site and, before long, he will probably be having flashbacks to his final days in Boston when he was one lone star, awash in a sea of mediocrity. Although Hitchcock won't say his team will target Bourque, he doesn't need to. This is the NHL playoffs and we all know how that works. But Hitchcock makes no attempt to disguise the fact his Stars will be disdaining their normal cautious game and forechecking with a vengeance. "I don't think we have any option," he said. "We need to get after people. We can't be afraid of taking penalties and we can't be afraid of getting caught. A few times we get caught, too bad. That is a chance we are going to have to take." It is a chance his players urged him to take. The Stars sat back in Game 1 and got burned. By the time they opened up in the third period, it was too late and although they applied considerable pressure, it was the Avs who left Reunion Arena with a 2-0 victory. The Dallas players were not happy. They felt they should be playing the style that necessity had imposed on them in the third period, rather than the one Hitchcock imposed on them for the first two. To Hitchcock's credit, he acquiesced. A bad coach forces players to change their game to fit his system. A good coach develops a system that makes the most of the talents of his players. PRESSURE TACTICS The basic premise in both camps was the same. The Stars like to apply pressure and in this case, it was merely a difference of opinion between players and coach on how best to achieve that aim. "Our game is making the other team spend an awful lot of time in their end," Hitchcock said. "It's a different forechecking system than maybe some teams use at this time of year, but we are not a very good hockey club at sitting and waiting. We can protect leads as well as anybody in the National Hockey League. We have proved that. "But we prefer to protect it with pressure -- strong position with the pressure, but with the focus on pressure. We did that in Game 2, and that negated a lot of their opportunities so we want to go back to a very aggressive mind-set. "Very aggressive." That is not good news for a team with a severely depleted defence corps.
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