So I finally watched the game from yesterday, and what a game it was indeed. Not in a good way mind you. The Canadians, for the first time in this series, played 60 minutes of CLEAN and absolutely dominating hockey. The worst part of it for the Russians? That it should have been worse. If Babrovsky hadn’t stood on his head for much of the game (letting in 1 soft goal of 8 if my memory holds) it would have been closer to 17-1 or something disgusting like that. The fact of the matter is, the Russians have no organization or team concept whatsoever. It really shows on their futile, and frankly embarrassing powerplay alignment.
Did you guys see how they ran the power play? They had 3, count em, 3 guys on the blue like, one guy in the high slot, and one guy floating near the net. Uhh, yeah, how exactly are you going to score with that kind of a setup? They forced themselves into a perimeter game with this alignment, and took their down low presence completely out of the game. This lets the defenders aggressively check the men with the puck, and use 2 guys to guard 3 up high very easily. If there is no down low presence, the D can stretch without fear of being torched down low. If the Russians would have had a more conventional setup, like the Canadians had, they would be better than the 3 for 218,493,908,509,832,095,830,950,953 that they currently are in this (I jokingly call it a) series.
Another thing the Russians do terribly is take point shots. They dont shoot them off the pass very often, instead they accept the pass, set the puck, and fire it. This 2 second process let’s team-Sutter get into position to block shots, and do they ever block shots. If the Russians used quick passes and shot off the pass you can bet your ass they would be more effective than they are now.
Finally, coaching. The Russians are just getting outcoached at every aspect of the game. In the first period the Russians had a few scoring chances, and played pretty decently defensively (decent for this team at least). They were trying to force things at the nearside blueline and were getting turnovers from that. After the first period, Sutter had far side men coming in hard into the zone, and his nearside guy would just dump it in. Before the Russians could get there, the Canadians had 2 or 3 guys already setting up a play. THAT is called coaching. The Russians never adjusted, and wham, a 0-0 game becomes a 5-1 game after the 2nd period.
On to the player of interest to us Ranger fans, Artem Anisimov. He had something like 2 decent scoring chances, and always seemed to go to the net playing a very north south game, however he was more or less invisible. Im not sure if its just the Sutter line completely nullifying his line, or if it is just his injury creeping up on him effecting his skating (he definitely seemed to lack the easy stride I saw in earlier games) but whatever it is, he was invisible, as he has been for most of this series. Don’t think it will be a regular thing with this kid folks. Remember, you are seeing a classic display of how an organized attack dismantles an unorganized “floating” game the Russians are playing. When AA comes to NY or Hartford, he will learn our system, and our system seems tailor made for a kid with his ability.
-Inferno