Torts did adjust, in a major way. Moving to a safer style was a huge adjustment for him. Thats what you dont get. You want to see the type of fast paced and exciting hockey you want to see and dont care much about if the ingredients are there or not. Its actually kind of selfish.
And oh, by the way, caveman hockey brought this franchise's best results since 1997 and (BY FAR) the best results since Sather's been at the helm.
You are looking at the wrong parameters. You are mixing up the parameters.
What parameters affect how offensive/defensive minded a team is?
1. How hard you forecheck vs how many players you keep back.
2. Your transition game. Do you play it safe or take risks with the puck?
3. How deep you collapse in your own end. How hard to you pressure the puck carrier? The points?
4. How much you allow your D's to join the attack.
Etc. Etc. Etc. Right?
For Torts, the transition play was -- never -- in play. Our transition play was never designed to do anything else than to get the puck below the hashmarks, slow the other team down, and get a circle going. This worked in the trap-era, you beat the trap by just fireing the puck up ice along the boards in the neutral zone and you made sure that you weren't hit with counter-attacks by getting the puck all the way down below the hashmarks.
This is the problem with NY media. Torts sit infront of them and say that "safe is death", while only referring to 1 and 4 above. We forechecked really hard often under him, and early on our D's joined the attack. Safe was stamped in Torts forehead in relation to 2 or 3. Nobody picked up on it. Nobody even commented on it.
I had no problems what-so-ever with Torts job with 1, 3 and 4. But -- all -- the good teams in this league is moving in the other direction and taking bigger risks than ever in the transition game. You constantly see them finding players moving W-E in the neutral zone (look at Bergeron, Krejci, Marchand and co in Boston). You never ever saw that pass to a player like Bergeron or Marchand or Krejci skating just inside the redline from E to W in like 03'. A god ol' NJD trap would have eaten that pass alive, killed the player, picked his pockets and scored a goal. If you managed to take a pass there with 3 guys on aline on the redline, you where ***** once you tried to do something wtih the puck. Hooks, slashes, grabs and what not. There is a ton of room for those plays now though, due to the D's being pushed back when they can't defend the redline anymore.
Torts didn't figure that out.
