20 years ago, if someone had asked whether NBA teams should shoot 3-pointers every possession, the thread would have looked about like this. Somewhere, a handful of guys were asking that question and they redesigned the entire game.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the question, or any reason to jump down his throat about it. It’s completely fair to think outside the current trends and experiment with ideas that could uncover new opportunities.
My best stab at answering your question (since I don’t 100% understand your premise):
The easiest way to neutralize this is to have a player shadow the cherry picking winger. So not only do you largely negate that advantage, you create a 4v4 offensive zone situation which is advantageous to the offense and puts “team cherry picking” at a disadvantage.
^^^ this is a huge part of why it doesn’t happen.
I would take it a step farther and say you don’t actually need to
shadow the cherry picker, you just need to cut him off from receiving a clean pass.
- The D can play significantly in front of him, and if they’re smart they’ll use the defensive blue line as an extra defender. That means they’ll deflect or intercept off the majority of those passes, which in turn means the D is going to have 30 feet of open ice to rev up a 5-on-4 counterattack. That’s really bad news for the opponent, worse than defending a PP because at least a PK unit has structure and usually clears the puck all 200 feet.
- In the event that the offensive team makes a pass to evade the D, it’s probably going to be directed toward the boards where the angles are highly unfavorable for a breakaway. It also means the path to the net is a lot longer than the lane up the middle of the ice. The defender has a straight-line sprint up the middle to recover, whereas the forward has to go chase the puck toward the boards or wherever, then turn back to the net. He’s going to end up in a partial-breakaway footrace at best, and those usually go nowhere.
- Most of all, the cherry picker has no support. NHL defensemen are very good in 1-on-1 situations. If it’s anything less than a clean breakaway, the defender is going to be right there on top of the puck. Without support, the cherry picker has nowhere to go.
This is why, at least in current philosophy, the game of hockey is organized around group rushes which create outnumbered situations. Even at 3v3, where everyone expected it to be nonstop breakaways back and forth, they quickly regressed into carefully working their way up the ice as a unit. It’s the most effective way to create an outnumbered situation where an offensive player will get a clean look. And to Hank’s point above, a cherry picker is basically gifting the opponent that outnumbered situation for an extended period in
hopes of occasionally getting a very brief clean breakaway of his own. It tilts the odds entirely in the wrong direction.
BTW, all of this is the reason for the existence of the blue lines.
