Top-end offensive players pose challenge in containment

The Coaches Room is a weekly column by one of four former NHL coaches and assistants who will turn their critical gaze to the game and explain it through the lens of a teacher.
In this edition, Daniel Lacroix, a former assistant with the Montreal Canadiens, New York Rangers, Tampa Bay Lightning and New York Islanders, discusses how to contain top-end offensive players.

Playing against high-end, skilled players is always a challenge. You're never going to shut down these players entirely, but there are ways to contain them.
Here are three keys to doing that:

1. Know your enemy

What are the player's tendencies and strengths? What are that player's weaknesses? Who does he struggle against, and why?
Those are all areas coaches will look at to prepare properly against top players.
A big part of it is being aware.
On Washington Capitals forward Alex Ovechkin's goal in the first period Monday, Montreal Canadiens defenseman Jordie Benn stared at the puck and allowed Ovechkin to get in behind him and redirect in a pass from Tom Wilson.

Anytime you're on the ice against Ovechkin, you have to have your head on a swivel. Your awareness should be, "This guy is dangerous. He's the most dangerous player on the ice. The goalie will take care of Tom Wilson. You take care of Ovechkin, who is standing three feet from you."
Montreal defenseman Jeff Petry did a better job of this when the Canadiens were on the penalty kill late in the second period.
John Carlson passed the puck toward Ovechkin in the left circle. Ovechkin was going to tee it up, as he usually does, but Petry, knowing that play was coming, made a great read. He took a step before he saw the play develop; by the time the puck got there, he had his stick on it and killed that play.
Ovechkin had more room on a 5-on-3 in the third period and he made Montreal pay with a power-play goal.

2. Matchups

It's always easier at home to match your shutdown players against the opponent's top players because the home team gets the last change before most face-offs. It's more difficult for the road team, so making sure you have you best defense pair on the ice and knowing when the opposition's top line is coming out is key.
Some coaches are really rigid in matching lines, so if you know the opposing coach wants a certain matchup, you can sometimes take advantage of this.
Even if you don't have your best forward line against their top line, if you start your line in the offensive zone, that means the opposition's best line will have to start in their defensive zone. And some coaches will just roll with that because they're so gung-ho about their matchups.
Some teams have the ability to match power against power. That's easier to do when your top players are also good two-way players such as Boston Bruins center Patrice Bergeron and Tampa Bay Lightning center Brayden Point. These are guys you want out against the opponent's best. They can play good minutes and can expose a good offensive line.

Top players play lots of minutes, so you have to make those minutes hard minutes. You do that by being physical against them. Any time a player has to stop and start to battle for his ice, then the game is a lot more demanding.
So if you finish your hits, if you make them battle for pucks, all those things are going to slow them down.
We often talk about matching their speed and taking their ice away with legal interference (you can't interfere with sticks anymore; the officials will call that). If you've got a good skating player such as Edmonton Oilers center Connor McDavid, you can take away their speed by matching it and taking your own ice. If you take your ice, that means he has to go around you and that's going to slow him down.

3. Discipline

The top players strive on the power play and often feed off that production.
Through games Monday, power-play goals accounted for 34.1 percent of the total goals from the top 20 goal-scorers (94 out of 276) in the NHL, and power-play points made up 32.9 percent of the total of the top 20 players in points (194 out of 590).
So limiting their ability to play on the power play will often take their candy away and help keep them off the score sheet.
For example, Patrik Laine of the Winnipeg Jets had scored seven of his 11 goals (63.6 percent) on the power play. I was in Helsinki, Finland, for the 2018 NHL Global Series between the Jets and Florida Panthers and saw Laine score three goals in the first game of the series on Nov. 1.
Before that game, Laine had three goals for the season and he played an OK first period against the Panthers. The puck didn't come to him much and little was happening.

Then he got an opportunity on the power play in the second period and he buried it. All of a sudden, his game got better because of one shot. He feels better about himself, scores another power-play goal in the third period and ends up with a hat trick.
If you've got a guy who isn't scoring as much as he'd like, you don't want to wake him up. You want to make the game hard on him, but you have to be disciplined.
Those power-play minutes are big minutes. That's when those guys' eyes light up. They don't like missing opportunities. They think that's when they're going to get going, so either your penalty kill needs to be extremely good and frustrate them even more, or better yet, don't give them that opportunity. Make them play 5-on-5.