Marshall: A deep analysis of the Islanders’ defense — and how the Penguins can beat it with versatility

If the Penguins want to get back to the Stanley Cup Final, they’re going to have to exorcise at least one ghost along the way.

It’ll be Barry Trotz, the mind behind the bench for two out of the Penguins’ past three playoff exits, appearing again for another go-round with the Islanders.

Trotz’s blueprint for success isn’t entirely difficult to employ: build a wall at the defensive blue line (a 1-1-3, more specifically — situating three defensive players along your blue line to mitigate zone entries), let the Penguins try to dangle through it, then eat them alive off the turnover. In the rare event the Penguins forwards can crack the code between the blue lines? Collapse five players on your goaltender and keep the Penguins busy on the perimeter.

If that sounds familiar, it’s because you’ve watched it in the postseason three years in a row.

But things played out differently this year. I want to cover a few areas of the ice that have shown significant improvement versus the Trotz system this season as well as call out a few areas of importance regarding how the Islanders go about their business.

Islanders’ neutral-zone coverage: 1-1-3 trap

We hear a lot about the Islanders’ trap, but what does it look like on paper? This visualization comes from one of my favorite systems analysts, Jack Han, from an article he wrote for The Coaches Site. This articulates what the Islanders’ alignment looks like between the blue lines.

The Islanders will run a similar system to the Penguins, a 1-2-2 forecheck, when they’re playing from behind or in a tie game. You mostly see the above look from the Islanders when they’re looking at a controlled breakout or playing with a lead.

The first thing to call out: three players aligned in tandem along the defensive blue line. This creates a disadvantage for just about any forward searching for a clean entry into the offensive zone. It gives the Islanders a wall of defense with a manpower advantage in most puck battles. At best, it forces a dump-and-chase scenario that the Islanders usually have the jump on given their presence back deep. This shows up in the data, as the Islanders are a top-five team defending rush chances this season. The system is one of the biggest reasons for that.

Stacking two forwards on top of each other in the neutral zone (F1, F2) allows the Islanders to funnel the play to the outside as forecheckers — forcing the breakout to the wide side of the ice and into low-percentage areas, or provide a reverse presence from the backcheck, further challenging a clean zone entry or attack off the rush.

We’ve seen this system frustrate the Penguins. The Penguins didn’t just let the Islanders get established in the neutral zone, they threw miracle-needed home-run passes through sticks, bodies and a mass of humanity in the neutral zone and, more importantly, into the heart of the Islanders’ trap.

One great rule of thumb in this system is the more distance your pass covers, the worse off you might end up — if the Islanders pick it off and your forwards lose speed to avoid going offside, they become sitting ducks.

In this clip, Kris Letang skated directly into the heart of a three-man presence at the offensive blue line, turned the puck over, and the two high forecheckers for the Islanders were off to the races in the other direction. Mistakes like these are why the Penguins led for a total of five minutes in their series against the Islanders in 2019. Mistake-ridden hockey, dictated by the Islanders’ presence in the neutral zone, ruled the pace of the game.

Last year against Montreal, the Penguins exhibited a tendency to be overly patient on their breakout and feed pucks right into an established set of Canadiens defenders. This year, things changed in a few different ways. To start, the breakout didn’t rely on long home-run passes. The forwards were back deeper in the defensive zone to give the breakout better options in getting up ice. These quick plays, hallmarked by puck support between the forward group, allowed the Penguins to work through the neutral zone before the Islanders had a chance to clog it up.

Beating the trap: help, speed and active defense

This wasn’t successful in every instance, but the Penguins’ ability to gain the zone wasn’t rife with risk throughout the eight-game season series. In this clip, take a look at how far back the forwards engage in the defensive zone and how quickly the breakout manifests as a result.

Remember, the Islanders have two forecheckers looking to disrupt breakouts. Because the Penguins move so quickly and activate their defense as a part of the rush, they trap the Islanders F1 and F2 deep in the zone, rendering them incapable of being a disruption.

Because Cody Ceci joins the rush from defense and facilitates this dump-in, the Penguins forwards can focus on a full, three-man retrieval process and outnumber the Islanders down low. It might not garner a shot on the rush, but it establishes a chance for zone time and, more importantly, safely gets the puck across the offensive blue line without giving the Islanders a chance at counter-punching.

Removing that counter-punching element forces the Islanders to play on some even terms with the Penguins, who are top 10 in their ability to defend slot passes, rush chances, and scoring chances that come via extended cycle. Forcing the Islanders to contend with that is a critical key to victory.

Another wrinkle I caught in this vein from the regular-season series was the use of lateral movement cross-ice in the neutral zone to create skating lanes for clean entry. The Islanders will float their neutral zone presence to the puck side of the ice, and the Penguins weasel out of that in this clip by shifting to the opposite side mid-breakout.

Again, this entire process is going to be facilitated by some help from the defense. The Penguins didn’t activate their defensemen much over the past two years, whether it was a lack of confidence in the personnel or concerns over systematic vulnerabilities. This season, the coaching staff seems to have unleashed the defense significantly more, enabling them to outnumber opponents.

Compare that to our first examples, and the difference is as tangible as it gets. The Penguins aren’t gift-wrapping mistakes for the Islanders.

Islanders’ defensive-zone coverage: five tight collapse

There’s another element to the Islanders’ success that makes them a frustrating out in a seven-game series. If you establish possession in the offensive zone, you get rewarded with a “five-man tight” defensive system. This goes by many names in the hockey vernacular, but you could get away with calling it “collapsing on your own goal.” There are a few ways to align in this system, and the Islanders will usually show a “box-plus-1” look, meaning they’ll box four players in the slot and leave a roving defenseman available to cover anything in the strong side corner or around the sides of the net.

This image of the system comes from a great breakdown by Blue Seat Blogs. Take a look at the box-plus-1 alignment below and how it positions players to protect the dangerous parts of the defensive zone in a wholesale way.

The Islanders fill the slot with bodies and protect their own net. You don’t need a video to show you that, you can just look at the heat maps from HockeyViz.com. Areas of blue denote parts of the ice where opponents take fewer shots relative to the league average. Areas of red indicate parts of the ice where opponents take more. For the Islanders, this map has a black hole in the middle, limiting the majority of shots to the low-percentage areas on the perimeter of the ice.

If you overlay this map with the Islanders’ structure we looked at earlier, it’s tit for tat. The system is designed to prevent shots from those areas, and it succeeds. If you can crack the Islanders’ neutral-zone presence, things don’t exactly get easier all of a sudden.

This heat map from Game 4 in 2019 is a microcosm of the series. With the Penguins facing elimination, they were able to muster only a few chances from the slot and the net-front area. This looks more like a Tuesday night game in December than a final opportunity to extend your season. The majority of the shots were taken from outside the slot or the left point. This map comes via Natural Stat Trick.

This season, the Penguins were able to control their destiny a bit more in the lower half of the offensive zone. They weren’t mitigated to low-percentage shots from the perimeter. They were able to exploit a critical area of weakness in the Islanders’ defensive structure.

Beating the collapse: the accordion model

Although the Islanders will pack it in, they also aggressively pressure players at the point. The top half of their box-plus-1 structure will break off and hound defensemen at the top of the ice, keeping with the theme of pressuring the puck for turnovers as they do in other areas.

The key piece is that sending the puck to the point opens space in the slot, removes two forwards from the equation and forces them to aggressively chase the puck to the high point. Using a low-high approach and working from behind the goal line in the offensive zone can work the Islanders’ defensive structure like an accordion, collapsing and expanding it over and over to generate open areas in the middle of the ice.

We didn’t just see the Penguins try out this approach — they scored a few goals doing it. I’m inclined to believe it’s intentional, given the frequency with which we saw it. In the clip below, you’ll see Bryan Rust score a goal in front of the net by executing some quick, low-to-high movement in the offensive zone. Notice how all three Penguin forwards keep their feet, moving to get in behind the Islanders’ defense as they drift up ice.

The Penguins send the puck to the point to bait the Islanders out to challenge them and then flood the net-front with a set of quick movements. The low-to-high pass opens and closes the Islanders’ defense and allows the Penguins to find space.

Another key piece to this low-high offensive zone approach is to send an additional player to the net-front courtesy of some active defense. In this next clip, you’ll see Letang sneak low in the zone and get a quality shot off a cycle that leads to a goal. Notice how the Penguins are setting up things here: They roll a forward through the middle of the zone as the Islanders pressure them at the point and get a good look at the net in the process. From there, the Islanders collapse, and Letang has the chance to sneak into the play.

You can get a sense of how aggressive the Islanders are on the puck and how far they’ll push to the point in the clips above. The key to exploiting that is quick puck movement and continued use of the area behind the net.

Don’t just take my word for it that these plays are working — check the heat map from the most recent meeting between these teams for some validation. As you can see, the Penguins were not limited to the perimeter and generated quality chances from the areas that the Islanders love to defend the most.

That’s a vastly different-looking map than the one we checked from the 2019 playoffs. It’s a testament to Mike Sullivan and the Penguins potentially finding their way through the weeds of the Trotz neutral zone trap.

I keep coming back to active defense, and it really sticks out on the video and data side. The Penguins don’t have any defensemen in their starting six who are incapable of moving the puck up ice. Per Andy & Rono at HockeyStatsCZ, John Marino, Ceci, and Mike Matheson are all in the top third of the league in defensive-zone possession exits among defensemen. That is an element that didn’t exist for the Penguins in 2019, and it’s another game-changer.

Geoff from The Pensblog and I discussed this on Twitter and he made a great point. If you’re looking for a defenseman to dump the puck in against and systematically target, that’s going to be difficult.

Everyone on the blue line this time around can skate and play the puck. The Islanders targeted specific defensemen with their dump ins and forecheck last go around because they knew those guys weren’t mobile and couldn’t break the puck out. Night and day difference this year https://t.co/b6PfSz0r3J

— geoff (@geoffwithano) May 11, 2021

The Penguins forwards and defensemen seem to have learned some valuable lessons from their recent playoff exits. Couple that with some strategic wrinkles and new, puck-moving faces on offense, and this doesn’t look like the team that bowed out with a whimper against this system in two consecutive years.

(Photo of Cody Ceci: Mike Stobe / NHLI via Getty Images)