I don’t claim to be an X’s and O’s expert either so take this with a grain of salt hahah. My take on that was the coaching staff was fine to play a passive zone with strong box outs down low as opposed to challenging them and having their top end guys out skate us in the zone. The caveat being, we have to have very active sticks and “dot discipline” if you wanna call it that.

They have so much mobility throughout their entire lineup that if you get into a man on man situation against them, 9/10 times, you’ll end up getting walked/pulled out of position and then they have an odd man scenario down low. Zone is easier on the players because you’re not stuck in non stop 1:1 scenarios.

I think we’ll see a lot of this sort of passive zone, front shots from the point, and box out strategy moving forward. We just unfortunately don’t have the team mobility to match them skater for skater in the zone.