The Vegas Golden Knights may have revolutionized defensive structure

Welcome to 5 Insights and Observations. Every week, I’ll use this space to highlight teams, players, storylines and general musings around the NHL.

This week we look at defensive zone coverage, an unexpected goal, the salary cap, signing players after one season in the NHL and opening festivities. Hockey is back!

A new defensive structure is sweeping the NHL

The NHL is a copycat league, and when teams win, others tend to take notice and ask how they did it. In the case of last year's Stanley Cup Champion Vegas Golden Knights, something that has caught the eye of teams around the league is the zone defense they deploy.

Most teams essentially play man-on-man defense, where the wingers matchup with their corresponding defender (i.e. right winger covers left defenseman and left winger covers right defenseman), while the center and two defensemen essentially cover whoever is closest/most dangerous in the zone — being sure to tag up and communicate any handoffs as teams try to cycle.

Vegas, on the other hand, plays a zone defense that focuses on clogging the middle of the ice, being aggressive in the slot and behind the net, but consequently allowing teams to pass the puck on the perimeter and shoot from the outside.

During the playoffs, Vegas controlled just over 46 percent of the 5v5 shot attempts, but by expected goals, they were over 51 percent. Take as many outside shots as you want, we’ll win the scoring chance battle and the game.

Their much acclaimed large defense corps (Alec Martinez was their smallest defender and he’s 6-foot-1, 200 pounds) was committed to blocking shots and made it difficult to get puck on net by blocking off passing lanes through the slot.

The implementation of that defensive structure also coincides with the growth of a league-wide offensive tactic of pulling a forward high in the offensive zone. Teams bring a forward high in the middle of the offensive zone, prompting a defensive zone skater to go with him and opening up the middle of the ice and the slot.

A zone defense, alternatively, serves as a much more controlled response to defend that. It's a strategy we've already seen the Edmonton Oilers and Tampa Bay Lightning make the shift to early in the season:

The Maple Leafs, to some degree, are doing so as well.

Teams are not just looking at Vegas’ enormous defense and trying to replicate the player personnel, they're also looking at the system used to enhance those players. That stands out even in the Golden Knights' case considering the starting goalies they used last season: Logan Thompson, Laurent Broissoit and Adin Hill — not exactly household names that opponents are gameplanning around. Now we’re seeing more teams shift to this style of play, in an attempt to replicate that winning formula.

Matthews, Draisaitl taking advantage from an unconventional area

Over a decade ago in the playoffs, Mike Richards scored a number of goals by ripping the puck at the goalie’s feet… from the goal line. Here he is burning Roberto Luongo - on a 5v3 no less!

Richards later scored an extremely similar goal against St. Louis deeper into the postseason (also of note: Richards recorded a Gordie Howe hat trick in this game, too).

These goals have always stuck with me as particularly interesting. Goalies are constantly cheating to the shooters in the slot, and often don't respect the player on the goal line as a scoring threat whatsoever.

As such, if the shooter can catch the netminder focused on the other options and rip a shot at the goalie's feet, they're unlikely to be able to recover in time — it's simply too difficult to get down if your mind is elsewhere, even if for a split second.

Of course, we bring this up because it happened again, as Auston Matthews wired a low hard shot past Jake Allen’s feet for his second goal of the game, eventually adding a third and helping lift the Maple Leafs to a 6-5 shootout win.

At first blush, Craig Simpson dismisses it as a bad goal, and it doesn't look great — Allen didn’t even manage to get his pad down!

Meanwhile, the puck is on Matthews’ stick for less than a second, as he whips a quick two-touch one-timer and catches Allen nearly frozen given how fast the sequence plays out.

Relatedly, the goal line is also where Leon Draisaitl often sets up camp for one-timers on the power play, as he scored a similar-looking goal against Vancouver in Edmonton’s season opener as well.

The reality is, if a goalie actually sets up and plays the situation properly, he's almost certainly not going to get beat, but most netminders simply aren’t doing that in these situations. The puck goes side-to-side, or there is commotion in front of the crease, or there is a player in a much more dangerous area, and it draws attention away from the shooter, creating a sneaky scoring opportunity. Players just need to keep an eye on it and take advantage of it where appropriate.

Clubs betting big on young talent in a flat cap world

In a hard cap world, the best way to build a sustainably successful team is to sign players to contracts that are below their actual market value. Doing so gives you more cap space to make trades, sign impact players, and retain your own stars.

Teams used to look for bargains in a variety of ways, namely on the free agent market, or by grinding through contract negotiations with restricted free agents and — before changes were put into place — signing top players to back-diving deals, driving down their average annual value.

That's the biggest reason teams like the Chicago Blackhawks and Los Angeles Kings were able to build such stacked rosters in a hard cap world, however, in the absence of those tools, the primary strategy is shifting even further, as teams are taking calculated bets by signing players to long-term contracts as soon as possible.

The Buffalo Sabres just gave Owen Power a seven-year, $58.45 million contract after a single pro season in the league. Jake Sanderson and the Ottawa Senators came to terms on an eight-year, $64 million contract under similar circumstances, with Sanderson having played just 77 professional games. Because both players played college, they were eligible to sign extensions after short runs in the NHL with limited service time under their belt.

Even other younger comparables like Miro Heiskanen and Quinn Hughes, both of whom signed at 21 years of age, played two seasons before putting pen to paper. This is a unique situation, and with a rising cap and the talent level of both players, both have the potential to look very shrewd in short order. Other teams will be watching and monitoring if the risk was worth the reward.

The hard, flat cap continues to wreak havoc

Speaking of a hard cap world, teams are really feeling the effects of the salary cap staying flat over the past several seasons.

Four teams opened their season by dressing just 11 forwards - the Senators, Kings, Oilers, and Vancouver Canucks. Perhaps coincidentally, three of these teams also lost their opener, while one of them was guaranteed to win given that the Canucks and Oilers played each other (though the Canucks seemingly did not look impacted whatsoever by the situation).

The Toronto Maple Leafs gave away a solid NHLer in Sam Lafferty to become cap compliant because he was making all of $1.15 million, a relative penance against the cap all things considered. At the Board of Governors meeting before the season kicked off, Gary Bettman said there was a “very preliminary” estimate for next season’s cap of $87 - 88 million, stressing it was very early.

A potential $3 million jump would be a welcome sight for everyone involved, and at some point, we have to acknowledge that this is hurting the league’s product. It’s not one team dressing a shorthanded roster, it’s a good handful, while others are scraping and clawing just to get to a conventional 12 forward, six defensemen, two goalie roster.

Of the 32 teams in the league, 20 of them are within $1 million of the salary cap, nearly 63 percent of the league. In fairness, half the teams in the league have full 23-man rosters, and the league will always argue that it’s on teams to prudently manage their salary cap situations.

At a certain point, however, you have to question the hard salary cap and the relatively low ceiling. Teams are dressing shorthanded rosters, actively shedding good players for cap reasons (look at all the cap-related trades in the summer that returned essentially nothing, as well as the buyouts), and acquiring players whose careers are over to manipulate the salary cap rules.

It might be good for league parity and it is definitely good for the owners' pockets, but is it the best thing for the game of hockey and bettering the product? That much is tough to argue.

The NHL (finally) gets it right on Opening Night

Last year's start to the NHL's season could best be described as inauspicious. The San Jose Sharks and Nashville Predators — two teams that are not exactly headliners — kicked off their campaign on a Friday - Saturday series in Europe that seemingly nobody in North America knew about.

To make matters worse, the regular season in North America didn’t start until the following Wednesday, and that night there were only two games played. It was a bizarre way to kick off a new season and it generated almost no interest. In this space, we criticized it last season.

This time around, however, the NHL deserves credit where it's due because the league did an excellent job this time around. There was no pseudo start, for one, but they also started with a triple header and smartly featured past and present in the primetime slot, as Conor Bedard made his debut against Sidney Crosby… and won. The game drew over 1.43 million viewers, the most-watched opening night game on record. It’s the most watched opening night in general overall. That’s a smashing success for the league.

Potentially even better, the league will be debuting an “NFL RedZone” type of product by scheduling every team to play on October 24 and launching Frozen Frenzy, which will catch all the goals, presumably power plays, empty net situations and everything else worth watching.

There is so much great hockey happening every single night and the league has to do a better job getting that message across to viewers. There has to be a concerted effort to push fans of particular teams to watch more than just them, and events like the upcoming Frozen Frenzy broadcast are one way to do that. The NHL has even staggered the start times to space things out properly, a more than welcome change. This is a great start to the NHL season. Now, if they can get international hockey back, they could really be in business.