Tuesday, December 22, 2009

Dubinsky and Boyle Exhange Punches, Tortorella talks about Win Streak

In his description of this morning's optional skate, Andrew Gross of Ranger Rants stated that forwards Brandon Dubinsky and Brian Boyle engaged in a minor scrap in which they exchanged several punches. The altercation was broken up quickly. This sounds more like the players fooling around rather than seriously fighting, as Aaron Voros looked to get in on the action as well, but I thought it would be worth putting up on the site. The players joked about the occurrence later on in the locker room.

Gross also caught up with head coach John Tortorella, who spoke about the recent 3-game winning streak as well as changes that have been made in their mentality.

“I think sometimes it’s a misconception on the team concept,” Tortorella said. “We want to forecheck. But when we talk about it as far as getting up the ice and forechecking and pressuring, people say they just want to go. That certainly hasn’t been our philosophy from Day 1 because you have to play defense in this league. We have changed a little bit in the neutral zone where it’s kind of a hybrid right now. When we have chances to go, we’re going. When we’re not, we’re going to be a little bit smarter as far as filling the middle. That was probably a couple of weeks ago we changed into that. But I think we’ve gotten better defensively, too. When you’re having problems scoring goals, you fall into that trap of just scoring goals and you forget about the details of playing defense. We have always talked about playing defense first and when we say defense first, it doesn’t mean we’re falling back and playing in our end zone. Defense is when you don’t have the puck, just being on the right side of the puck. We’ve gotten better and better on the odd man rushes and that’s just being cognizant of being on the right side of the puck.”

The change that Tortorella is speaking of was the same one I addressed in the month of November. (read that post here) The team is not as aggressive as they once were to begin the season, and it probably was a change that needed to be made because they were being caught pinching much too often, eventually leading to odd-man rushes. That has not been so much of a problem lately.

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