Bruce Cassidy won’t make wholesale change with Golden Knights
The Golden Knights are shaping up to be a cocktail of influences.
That much seems obvious considering all the different videos the team’s new coaching staff showed players in training camp. There was footage of coach Bruce Cassidy’s Boston teams for defense. Clips of the Knights for offense. And a sprinkle of Dallas’ penalty killing for good measure.
Cassidy is pulling from a variety of sources when constructing the style of play he thinks will get the Knights back in the playoffs. He’s drawing from his successful six-season run with the Bruins but not beholden to it.
The goal is to create a hybrid style the Knights can call their own. How quickly they take to it could determine if it’s successful.
“Doesn’t seem like he’s trying to reinvent the wheel or anything like that,” center Chandler Stephenson said. “Just things that he thinks could really help us.”
Cassidy’s training camp was different from previous ones for the Knights.
Sessions were longer. There was extra skating. And there was plenty of teaching to make sure players grasped new concepts as early as possible.
Defense was emphasized first because that’s where the Knights are making the largest change. Cassidy prefers a zone style, in which skaters defend spaces rather than specific opponents. It requires defensemen to play smart and communicate.
If they don’t, breakdowns can lead to wide-open scoring chances. But Boston showed what could happen if things are done well. The Bruins gave up the second-fewest goals in the NHL during Cassidy’s tenure. They allowed the fewest scoring chances in the league last season, according to the website NaturalStatTrick.
“We’ve got the right personnel,” defenseman Alec Martinez said. “We’re more than capable of handling it.”
Cassidy isn’t changing the Knights’ neutral zone as much. Instead, he said he’s “reaching back a little bit in time.” The team is returning to a 1-2-2 forecheck reminiscent of how it played under its first coach, Gerard Gallant. Previous coach Pete DeBoer kept it early in his tenure before switching to a more passive 1-1-3 look last season.
The change allowed the Knights to create more turnovers in the neutral zone and force more teams to dump the puck. It also required defensemen to stand still at the blue line to do that, which often led to them absorbing hits when going back to retrieve pucks.
The new system should give defensemen more room to operate. The hope is that allows them the space to make skilled plays, which should help talented blue liners Shea Theodore and Alex Pietrangelo.
“It allows us to use our feet a little bit more,” Theodore said. “I think it’s going to benefit us.”
In the offensive zone, Cassidy isn’t changing much. The Knights were ranked eighth in the NHL in five-on-five scoring last season despite a constant barrage of injuries, so staying the course makes sense. The only question will be how the team’s new philosophies elsewhere mesh with its previous approach, since hockey is such a free-flowing game.
However the five-on-five play breaks down, the Knights also need to show improvement on special teams. They were 21st on the penalty kill last season (77.4 percent) and 25th on the power play (18.4 percent).
Cassidy provides hope in that area. Boston was third on the power play and penalty kill during his tenure. On the man advantage, he wants the puck in forwards’ hands closer to the net. Short-handed, the Knights won’t be aggressive as they were under DeBoer. Assistant coach John Stevens is running the show there after the Stars ranked 16th on the penalty kill with him the past three seasons.
The hope is that the tweaks add up to a better whole this season. The Knights lost plenty of talent in forwards Evgenii Dadonov (trade), Mattias Janmark (free agency) and Max Pacioretty (trade), defenseman Dylan Coghlan (trade) and starting goaltender Robin Lehner (season-ending injury). They will need to play better in a lot of areas to make up for that.
“We’re changing some things,” Cassidy said. “We’re not changing everything. I think this team’s had a lot of success.”
Contact Ben Gotz at bgotz@reviewjournal.com. Follow @BenSGotz on Twitter.