http://thecommittedindian.com/these-pictures-of-q/Great column and comments right here. Best part:
Quote:
His overriding philosophy. And it’s one a lot of teams don’t understand and get wrong. Q believes in defensive responsibility with speed. The Hawks speed isn’t just being able to streak up the ice to score, beating defenders to the outside, and tearing through the neutral zone. Where their speed is truly devastating is actually in reverse, on the backcheck. They Hawks can squeeze teams so quickly, and it’s why their defense can stand up at their blue line and basically give the opponents about 10 feet to play in. All the Hawks D can be so aggressive because even if they miss there’s a retreating forward right on the puck-carriers’ ass. It’s how they cause so many turnovers in the neutral zone and turn it around so quickly into odd-man rushes for themselves. Essentially the Hawk forwards push the opponents into the jagged rocks of the defense at a speed faster than the opponents want to play and they have to make decisions quicker than they want. It’s the base for the Hawks’ entire game.
and a very interesting comment in response:
Quote:
One thing about Q's overall philosophy, which you've nicely described, is how modern it is. It really depends on the modern-era version of an NHL roster, the concept perfected by the 2000s Red Wings, of four lines and three pairs who rotate relentlessly and always skate intense short shifts.
(A team having even one full line of old-school big plodding bangers can't play the way the Hawks do because that line won't be able to keep up the pace. So either the opposition exploits that line to get an endless collection of odd-man breaks or else the other lines get worn out by taking longer shifts to compensate. In the Hawks' system even a single relatively-slow skater, viz Bollig or Handzus, stands out and makes us all queasy.)
No NHL team in the era of Q's playing career really followed Q's coaching system. Well except as a temporary thing, the way NBA teams will sometimes switch to a full-court press...moreover Quenneville personally as a player could not play well in this system. (He was a well-regarded but by his own admission slowfooted stay-at-home defenseman of an older school.)
To me that's interesting: as a coach he's adopted and committed to a structure which neither his own playing career nor the hockey traditions he grew up in could have provided examples for. The exact opposite of so many reactionary coaches and hockey mediots for whom the way it was done back in the day (whenever their specific day was) is forevermore the template of what they consider to be holy and correct...Q is the anti-Milbury, we might say.
Paragraph 2 of that comment is pretty much why the Hawks swept the Sharks in 2010, by the way. Q rolled four lines while McLellan rode his top six like a mechanical bull. The Hawks wore Thornton/Marleau/Heatley out
and pounced hard on their plugs.
Don't get me wrong: I wouldn't call myself the president of the Joel Quenneville ALS. (I
did do that for B&B, and look how that turned out.) But it is nice to get a dash of perspective regarding the things he does bring to the club. It's so easy to lose the big picture when we lock in on every Hawks game and don't keep a pulse on the rest of the league. He's a very good coach.
_________________
Molly Lambert wrote:
The future holds the possibility to be great or terrible, and since it has not yet occurred it remains simultaneously both.
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