On Defense

Okay, you know I'm not one to question the head coach, but this blurb by Steve Zipay has me a little worried. I appreciate the idea of bringing the albatross twins back into the fold, claiming they can be good defensemen, and giving them an honest fresh start to the season. I really do like a team culture that does that. It's great.

And I'll even say I'm ready to buy into the Tortorella "don't waste time playing defense" "safe is death" philosophy. I like it when my defensemen join the rush, and while my ideal philosophy probably falls somewhere between the two, I'm fully confident that the Rangers are on the correct half of the Tortorella-Lemaire continuum.

However, defensemen stop a team from giving up goals. That's what they do. And giving up goals is very bad. And as much as I'm bitter about giving up the best penalty killing tandem in the league for what is looking increasingly like Brian Boyle and Aaron Voros, I was at least somewhat sated by the idea that our defense is ostensibly going to improve this season. After all, not only did we lose Derek Morris (and, sadly, Paul Mara) for some very exciting-sounding kids, we also picked up a head coach who seems to appreciate both how good Marc Staal is at hockey and how much of a liability overpaid veterans can be. Under Torts, I expect to see more of those talented kids and less of the older liabilities. So, generally, though I'll miss Paul Mara, our defense is looking up.

So why am I worried? Well, first, 'cause I'm a Ranger fan, and it's all I know how to do. But second, and more to the point, is this seemingly innocuous idea that Torts has split up the Staal-Girardi and Redden-Rozsival pairs. His defensive strategy so far seems to be "put a young inexperienced guy with an old experienced guy." In theory, it's a pretty good strategy.

But here's the thing. The pairs Zipay highlights are: Del Zotto-Redden; Gilroy-Girardi; Staal-Rozsival; Sanguinetti-Semenov. I'm ignoring that I really don't understand which side these people play on (I think that in each of those pairs, the defensemen are the-same-handed) and moving forward. Sometimes, defensemen make mistakes. This happens. Defensive mistakes often lead to opposing scoring chances (and hence to opposing goals). Sometimes, when a defenseman makes a mistake, however, his defensive partner covers for him. This usually puts that partner in a worse state: out of his own position, not where he intended to be, covering for someone else's mistake. But it often successfully prevents the aforementioned scoring chance, and therefore the goal.

Here's the point: putting a bad wing next to an incredibly skilled center is often a reasonable thing to do. You spread out your offensive talent and all of a sudden every line can score. I've often said, for example, that I probably could have gotten 50 points a season centering Jagr and Straka. Defense doesn't work like that. If I were on a pair with Staal, he'd spend all his time covering for my fat ass, and he probably wouldn't be a terribly effective player. At least last season, Redden and Rozsie were eventually confined to the same pair. You may have noticed something about Dan Girardi: when he found himself on a pair with Staal, he became a better player. This is because he was free to do his job and not cover for one of the old men.

Gilroy-Girardi is a pair I can kinda get behind, and you know I had suggested Sangs-Semenov myself. But think about how held back Staal is going to be when paired with Rozsival, as compared to when he can skate around with Girardi. And Del Zotto-Redden? Really? Del Zotto-Redden? I can't think of a better way to completely ruin a kid's career than to give him real NHL ice time under the Garden spotlight and make him skate around cleaning up Redden's shit all game, every game.

Anyway, I'm probably overreacting (and I definitely used way more words than I had to to make this fairly simple point), but I really don't like the idea that a Rozsival or a Redden will be on the ice for two thirds of every game. That worries me.