NHLers Enjoy Aggressive Coaching Just As Much As Fans Do

After the last NHL lockout, the league put an emphasis on trying to take trapping out of hockey, saying that fans didn’t want to watch a team trap for three periods. So the league tweaked some rules and did what it could to put some more speed into the game. And for the most part it worked. But I always wondered how players felt about it. For many NHL players, trapping was all they knew. Some, like Scott Gomez, had refined their game to thrive in trapping situations. Players like that couldn’t have been too excited about the game moving away from that. But now, here we are six years later, and it seems that younger players, players who didn’t play through the trap-dominated 90s, are anxious to play for coaches who err on the side of aggression. Look at the Tampa Bay Lightning, about to start year two under coach Guy Boucher. Boucher got a lot of notice at the start of last season for his aggressive, unusual-for-the-NHL systems, but he wound up getting a lot of ...