Stalling Out

The Flyers-Tampa Bay game the other night is the talk of the league right now.  Briefly, Tampa Bay plays a unique and very conservative 1-3-1 neutral zone trap.  The Flyers didn't want to skate into it, so they just stood there with the puck in the their own end.  Literally.  Repeatedly.

It made for a dreadful first period.  There were a lot of penalties in then 2nd period, and things got more heated in the 3rd, but the ugly sight of the first period is sticking in people's minds.  What to do about it?

First thing, what the NHL does NOT want to do is make a rash, midseason rule change for what is still an isolated incident.  Let's see how much of a problem this is before directly addressing it.

If you do identify it as an ongoing concern, then you need to decide upon whom to place the burden.  Bob McKenzie polled the GMs on who was in the wrong here, and of the 18 GMs that responded, 13 said TB. 

Often people's first inclination to remedy the problem is a shot clock like solution which requires a team to carry the puck out of their own zone.  The way I see it, the behavior the NHL wants to root out is the trap.  Why reinforce the notion that trapping is a dominant strategy?  If the NHL is going to choose to force someone to change their ways, it should penalize trapping.

Any solution should be simple.  Simple to comply with, simple to judge, and hopefully with few unintended consequences.  It would be very easy to place a burden on a team to force them to carry the puck into a trap--just pass a rule like basketball where a ball possessor has 5 seconds to advance the puck in a count carried out by the officials (no actual clock).

Placing a burden on the trapping team is a little more difficult, but doesn't have to be an obtuse rule.  You could have illegal defense rules like the NBA, you could ban forwards from skating backwards in the neutral zone, or you could put a 5 second rule on them for someone to pursue the puck.  I think the latter is the best idea.  No convoluted rules, clocks, it just means that when a defensemen has a puck in his own end, you have to challenge him after a few seconds of standing around.  Simple.

I suspect we're not going to see many more incidents like that this year, but if we do it should be addressed in the offseason to place a burden on the trapping team.  No one likes the trap anyway.