Life is zooming faster by the minute. So is hockey.
Speed has been a primary NHL selling point for decades, with the rest of the sport following suit. It's true: Out of the major professional sports, hockey players move the fastest, mostly thanks to their mode of transportation. That little black piece of rubber gets around, too, matching any implement velocity this side of jai alai.
But all of that has been the case since before Mario Lemieux and Wayne Gretzky turned pro. The name of the modern game isn't just raw speed. It's about increasing speed, and the demands that time crunch puts on those who play the game.
"I think the game’s faster than it’s ever been, absolutely," said Mike Sullivan, whose Penguins traffic in speed better than most. "I think coaching staffs certainly learn through the process and try to employ strategies to get their teams competitive advantages, and I think speed’s one of them."
If you're a longtime hockey observer, you probably didn't need Sully to tell you the game is quicker than it used to be. That fact applies across the board in all sports, as training, coaching and equipment gets more refined by the day.
According to Pittsburgh-based strength specialist Jeremy Hoy, who has trained local pros like former Canuck and Bruin Matt Bartkowski, the difference from when he started in the hockey business is striking.
"I think that each team is consistently having more athleticism on all lines and everyone can move well," Hoy said. "As a viewer, if all lines are fast, skilled, and athletic, then the game never slows down."
Hockey has tended to move along in cycles, with the in-vogue style of play usually mimicking the most successful teams.
Just look at the past 10 years in the NHL. Coming out of the full-season lockout of 2004-05, the truculent Ducks brought about a spike in physical play and fighting, with the puck-possessing Red Wings and Penguins countering as the decade turned. The Blackhawks amped that style to a quicker pace, but the Kings mixed in a dose of 'heavy' hockey in swapping titles with Chicago.
Now, after back-to-back Stanley Cup Finals played at breakneck pace, the high-speed trend seems at a new peak.
"I don’t think our team is revolutionizing the game by any stretch," Sullivan said. "I think we have certain strategies and concepts that help us and I think there are certain teams in the league that use similar strategies. This league does tend to be a copycat league. We’re all watching one another. We’re all trying to get a look for ways to improve our team, so if we can take best practices from one of our opponents or someone else in the league, then we try to do that."
So why has speed largely taken hold as the first thing mentioned when players, coaches and executives are asked for building blocks of success? How has the increased velocity changed how the game is played? And what's the logical end of this trend?
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Ruslan Fedotenko entered the NHL at the turn of the 21st century with the Flyers. He made his final appearance in the world's top league in 2013, also with Philadelphia.
While in town earlier this month to participate in the Penguins' honoring of the 2008-09 Stanley Cup team, Fedotenko opined on how he thinks the NHL has changed the most since he emigrated from the Ukraine to play junior hockey in Canada 20 years ago.
"Just the speed," the 38-year-old forward said, gazing out at the PPG Paints Arena ice while the Penguins were practicing at a quick pace. "I started in 2000, with (the) Flyers. We had, what, the smallest (defenseman) was 6-foot-3? Big, big solid defensemen. It (was) a lot more hooking, more grabbing, more stick between your legs. Those kind of things were in the rules, so you had different kind of players. Different kind of games.
"Now there's so much speed, because you can't hook, you can't hold, you can't interfere. And athletes are so, so (much) faster on the ice."
The standard of the much-publicized post-lockout obstruction crackdown has slipped over the past few years. Objectively, in terms of power-play chances per game, the past three seasons rank in the bottom four of the post-expansion era, with 2016-17's 6.34 per game on pace to fall in that neighborhood.
Nevertheless, 2005-06 appears to be the consensus turning point when speed began to take hold over strength and craftiness, and it quickly filtered down to lower levels of the game.
"I think the change of the rules, where you can go to the goal and not get mugged, has enabled a lot of the smaller players to really have great success at the NHL level," Boston College coach Jerry York said last month while in town for the annual Three Rivers Classic college hockey tournament.
It took a few years for the Derian Hatcher and Mike Rathje types to be weeded out -- and, heck, Rob Scuderi is still playing in the American Hockey League -- but it wasn't long after the NHL returned from its work stoppage that being slow-footed meant trouble.
"It's a different game all around," said Hal Gill, whose 6-foot-7 frame undoubtedly helped mitigate his plodding style until his retirement in 2014. "I still think I could play right now, and I'm way off-base in saying that. It's a fast game. It's a different style, but you have to find whatever works."
What works increasingly well is being able to soar on one's skates. Not that speed was ever a bad thing to have in hockey, but with stick fouls and interference less prevalent than they were in the 1990s and early 2000s, elusiveness is increasingly a requirement, not just a nice thing to have.
To that point, Evgeni Malkin recently told NHL.com that he worked more on short-burst, straight-line speed last summer, because he sensed he was falling slightly off the pace as he hit 30. A former teammate of Sidney Crosby's when he made his NHL debut says the Penguins' captain is just as fast at 29 as he was at 18 -- if not quicker -- but the increasing speed of the league has brought him back to the pack.
Hoy said more effective conditioning techniques and a more professional mindset among young athletes have resulted in a sport that requires more quickness in a variety of areas.
He's seen the differences while training pros and his amateur clients: The Robert Morris men's and women's teams and the Youngstown Phantoms of the junior-level United States Hockey League.
"Yes, (the players) do think the game is quicker, but more that it is being played at a much quicker pace between the ears, which relies on a better skill set, especially when it comes to moving the puck, and positioning on the ice," Hoy told me. "When I first started in the business, I had many players that could skate well but were grossly un-athletic off the ice. Off-ice training has become very serious from a long-term development perspective, so hockey players are becoming faster, stronger, more explosive and more resilient."
That arms (and legs) race bleeds into every aspect of game play, Sullivan reminded.
"I think that’s just been the evolution of the game, and speed’s a critical factor, but it’s not just foot speed," he said. "It’s speed in all of its forms. It’s ability to see the play quickly and windows of opportunity open and close, so your mind speed is very important. It’s hard to execute if you don’t see it. I think there are a number of reasons behind it, but I think it’s obvious that from season to season, the game seems to get faster."
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Chris Kunitz broke into the NHL in 2003-04 with the then-Mighty Ducks, so he remembers what hockey was like pre-lockout, when the two-line pass rule made it easier for teams to clog the neutral zone and generally slow the game.
Effectively taking the red line out of the game may have inspired some teams to simply move their picket fence back to their own blue line -- think Guy Boucher's passive 1-3-1 forecheck with the Lightning -- but overall Kunitz thinks attackers have it easier these days, especially as it pertains to getting speed going between the blue lines.
"That just helped the offense, (against) the trap," Kunitz told me after Tuesday's practice at the Lemieux Sports Complex. "There were teams that used to run the trap and run five guys into that (neutral-zone) area and make it tough to make a pass and complete a zone entry. I think the red line (removal) was trying to take out the trap part of the game and make it more fluid from offense to defense."
All it takes is one flip pass from Phil Kessel to Carl Hagelin to realize how briskly a modern counterattack can move:
"I think one of the evolutions of the game has been that there are a lot more area plays, where you get in footraces," Sullivan said, describing a significant part of the Penguins' breakout strategy. "You force defensemen to try to chase pucks down."
There's always the hazard of icing the puck when trying a long pass, but a properly-weighted dish to a general area doesn't require the precision that a tape-to-tape breakout does.
"Tic-tac-toe passing isn’t the same," Kunitz said. "It’s lots of flips out into the neutral zone, chasing down pucks and being in footraces. That’s the area that you have to be on our toes as a D-man. As a forward, you’re allowed to leave the zone and try for a play, rather than hunkering down and maybe chipping it out as a last resort. We saw that before, where a flip was a last resort play, to kinda get it out of the zone."
With winged-footed wingers like Kessel, Hagelin, Bryan Rust and Conor Sheary, plus fluid offensive blueliners in Kris Letang and Trevor Daley, the Penguins are one of the NHL teams best positioned to take advantage of current trends.
On the other hand, a methodical skater like Olli Määttä would probably seem more at home in the earlier days of the league. He told me his focus is to think a couple of steps ahead in order to make the right move with the puck.
"The way teams play now, it’s more trying to play a north-south game, instead of east-west," the fourth-year defenseman said. "It’s about just quick-striking. I think it’s more about positioning and ... playing with your instincts. I think that’s a big part of it: You got to think fast in (today's) game. Try to get the puck up as soon as you can, because I know at least with our team, our forwards are that good."
'North-south' was a phrase often uttered by Dan Bylsma during his Pittsburgh tenure, particularly when he was trying to break the Penguins of their Michel Therrien-inspired counterattacking posture. There's quite a bit of Disco echo in Sullivan's tactics, in fact.
Bylsma memorably directed his defensemen to be aggressive in keeping plays alive in the offensive zone. Kunitz said the mobility of modern blueliners has as much to do with the increasingly frantic pace as the guys up front. For every action, there's a reaction.
"You see a trend of defensemen who can skate," he said. "They’re not necessarily backing up ever again. They’re all skating forward and into the play. Because of that, you see a lot of teams stretching the neutral zone (width) and playing wide speed. That’s kind of how the game’s evolved, to the individual skill of one-on-one and playing with speed."
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Rust is one of the faster players in the NHL, but he realizes that, if everyone's playing faster, a competitive edge is tougher to create.
“Yeah, I think it definitely plays into my strengths, but then again, when there’s more and more guys who can skate, it might make it a little harder on me," he said, chuckling.
On the surface, though, a faster game would seem to benefit offensive players like Rust. The guys with the puck know where they're going, so they should always have the first step, right? However, it's rarely ever been harder to score in the NHL.
Even after this week's offensive extravaganzas in Pittsburgh (15 combined goals), New York (13) and Denver (10), the average game this season features 5.52 goals. That's well clear of the modern-era nadir of 5.14 in 2003-04, but still the 13th-lowest of 50 post-expansion NHL seasons. (This year's scoring pace is a tenth of a goal higher than 2015-16, although we still have the typically-tighter playoff push ahead, so let's hold the confetti for now.)
Looking at more incremental data, combined shots on goal per game have held steady in the 59-to-61 range since the full-season lockout, although total shot attempts have ticked up from around 100 per game in 2007-08 to the 110 range throughout most of this decade. A quicker pace has meant more attempts, although better goaltending and more shot blocking has largely neutralized the uptick.
Clearly, more speed doesn't necessarily mean more frequent red lights. If anything, one could argue that with skating ability at an all-time high across the sport, there's less effective space than ever to maneuver with the puck.
"Sometimes, for example, coming through the neutral zone, you’re better off not having the puck than having the puck," Sullivan said. "When you don’t have the puck, they can’t lay a hand on you, they can’t impede your progress, with the interference rule."
If you watched the clip near the top of this story, from the 1996-97 season, you noticed how much space there was in the offensive zone for Stu Barnes and Joe Dziedzic to hook up for a goal. Nowadays, it takes a 4-on-4 situation to witness that kind of room, as this Malkin goal from Monday night shows:
An oft-suggested solution to hockey's space issue is to expand the rink width from 85 feet. If the 100-foot Olympic standard isn't feasible, maybe somewhere in the regulation window for Finnish rinks (85-98 feet) could create extra breathing room without making it resemble soccer on ice.
"European hockey, you play a lot of east-west, you’re trying to hold onto pucks," Määttä said. "Here, there’s not a lot of time. Teams are pressing pretty fast. I like it as it is. Brings a more physical element to the game. I think it makes hockey what hockey should be: Playing with your instincts. You don’t have a lot of time with the puck, which separates really good players from average players."
To Olli's point, somehow Crosby is on his most prolific goal-per-game pace (0.73) since 2010-11, despite having less space to move than ever before.
"I always try to be good around the net, especially now, with so many guys who like to block shots," said Crosby, who's on pace for a career-high 55 goals. "You have to be around the net to create chances and second opportunities. Pucks have found me there. When the pucks are coming to you there, you continue to go there."
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Daley's theory on the origins of speed revolution comes from personal experience. His fourth year in the NHL ended when his Stars were dismantled by the Red Wings in the 2008 Western Conference final.
“You want to know why the game is faster now? I’ll tell you exactly why. The Detroit Red Wings, that’s why," Daley said. "What they did in 2008 and 2009 was incredible. Those are the best teams I’ve ever played against. And it was incredible that the Penguins beat them. I think, at that point, the rest of the NHL saw what skating could do, and everyone’s trying to play that way now.
"It's not easy. You need the right players. But the game’s going in that direction because of that team and the way it played. Big, stay-at-home defensemen? That team didn’t need guys like that. Now, no one has them.”
Not every team can play with the velocity of today's Penguins, Maple Leafs or Lightning. For example, the Kings would be foolish to shift abruptly from their brand of big-body hockey, unless they're interested in completely tearing it down.
At the same time, with the influx of faster players via junior and college hockey, the ready supply of speedsters has never been greater. As Jim Rutherford realized after a year in charge of the Penguins, youth can rejuvenate a roster in a hurry these days.
"You don't need a big guy," Fedotenko said. "You need a mobile guy who can skate. You can see a lot of younger players who can come to the league and have a huge impact, versus before, at six feet, 175 pounds, you weren't going to (produce) much, unless you're Gretzky or you're Sid or somebody else. You'd have a tough time to battle through that. So the game changed, and those changes have helped young guys have a big impact."
Even the guy who once had a battleship nickname can buy into it, albeit with a caveat.
"It's a different style, but you have to find whatever works," (the U.S.S.) Gill said. "You can't look at another team's blueprint and say that's going to work for you. Every team finds their own way. That's what makes it fun. That's what makes it exciting."
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