As a group, hockey coaches don’t often command the spotlight when the cameras roll. They defer to their players and reserve whatever fiery rhetorical skills they possess for the sanctity of the dressing room.

Guys like Dale Hunter and Darryl Sutter will never make the list of the century’s great orators, anyway. But then there’s the Rangers’ John Tortorella, the subject of the video tribute above (the great work of DJ Steve Porter who, as Yahoo’s Puck Daddy Editor Greg Wyshynski relates, has a pretty impressive history of remixing video clips, hockey and otherwise) that appeared on Saturday over Hockey Night In Canada.

Torts is the most outwardly passionate NHL coach of recent times. Some of it could be calculated, as Dave Stubbs of The Montreal Gazette speculates. “The coach’s shtick probably is carefully crafted to take heat off his team, give the opponent as little information as possible and keep the media off balance.” And some may not, as Stan Fischler, who has followed and worked in hockey for most of his 80 years, told Stubbs. “John is very much like Toe Blake was with the Canadiens,” Fischler said. “Like Toe, John’s emotional level remains very high for a very long time after a game. That’s what you often see in his news conferences.”

As a member of the MSG Network crew, Fischler has seen a lot of Torts’ act, as has anyone who has followed his rise from assistant coach to Stanley Cup Champion in Tampa Bay to the curmudgeon on TSN’s hockey panel (sadly, none of his fantastically angry appearances on the “Quiz” segment can be found online) to his current leading role on  Broadway.

There’s a great unpredictability about Tortorella. He’s not adverse to criticizing his own players publicly, but he can also reveal none of his thoughts about them. He will provide insightful answers, but just as frequently, he’ll go radio silent on strategy and tactics. He can be very forthcoming and he can berate a questioner. He’s been fined by the NHL for his remarks about officiating and other teams, and now he’ll often stop short when answering, fearful of another hit to his savings account.

When it’s time for his postgame observations, you’d best not head to the kitchen for a snack as he steps behind the microphones. Torts can be awfully brief, like here. Sometimes he can be even briefer, like here. But whether he’s limited or lengthy, civil or curt, Tortorella is never dull. Stubbs calls him “fittingly showbiz in the world’s headquarters of the theatre.”

That said, here are some of John Tortorella’s greatest hits. To get you started, this is a compilation produced by TSN, his employer for about half a year when he was not coaching.

Viewers of HBO’s 24/7 got a strong taste of his demanding style in the run-up to the Winter Classic.

That sort of heated discourse was on display in every episode. You had to wonder how long the players would stomach it, but they finished first in the Eastern Conference. Even as recently as last week, analysts on TSN’s That’s Hockey program wondered if his being disrespectful to players would burn them out (video). It hasn’t happened yet.

After the Winter Classic, Tortorella alleged that the NHL and NBC may have gotten together to effect the outcome of the game. That got him a nice-sized fine.

In November, Torts had this little exchange when Sharks captain Joe Thornton made critical remarks about the Rangers.

In March, Tortorella got into it with Devils coach Pete DeBoer, who had accused him of being a hypocrite, after Torts objected to the manufactured fisticuffs that had started the two most recent games between the teams.

With the advent of in-game interviews by NBC, Torts has provided some amusing moments, like this one with Brian Engblom.

Just last weekend, in Game 7 against the Capitals, Torts started laughing at his own reticence with Pierre McGuire.

Here’s his press briefing before the start of the Eastern Conference Final where you can see the entire spectrum of Tortorella interaction. He’s abrupt, voluble, defensive, aggressive, generous and cautious all in a matter of minutes.

(We don’t agree with him at all about the red line but, as he says, it’s a discussion for another day.)

Mount Tortorella erupted against the Penguins after an April game in which Derek Stepan went knee on knee with Pittsburgh’s Brooks Orpik.

But perhaps his most famous confrontations have been with New York Post hockey scribe Larry Brooks, the first dating back to 2007.

One thing is certain: A John Tortorella press conference is usually not rated PG.

After seeing that one, his former co-worker on TSN, James Duthie, said that gathering had “more beeps than a Road Runner cartoon.”

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How much Dale Hunter’s relationship with Alexander Ovechkin factored into the coach’s decision to quit is an intriguing question. (Rob Carr/Getty Images)

The mercurial NHL coaching career of Dale Hunter came to an end on Monday when he told the Washington Capitals that, after less than six months, it was time to go. He did a lot in a short time, turning the glamorous Caps into a team suddenly known for glamorless defense. He got them into the playoffs, knocked off the defending Stanley Cup champion Bruins in the tightest seven-game series in playoff history and took the Eastern Conference’s top seed, the Rangers, to seven games before succumbing, 2-1, on Saturday. But now he’ll return to his OHL team, the London Knights, one of hockey’s most successful junior franchises, which he co-owns with his brother Mark.

“It wasn’t unexpected,” Caps GM George McPhee told reporters at the team’s suburban practice facility (video). But for those who saw in Hunter’s makeover the direction that the club must take to achieve that elusive playoff success in the Alex Ovechkin Era, the coach’s departure can’t be anything but a disappointment. Perhaps speaking for that segment of Caps Nation, The Post’s sports columnist Tom Boswell called Hunter’s decision “UNBELIEVABLE!”

“How can you be Dale Hunter, get everybody to “buy into” your brutally painful way of playing hockey, have some success with it and then QUIT!!!???,” an obviously astonished Boswell wrote. “That’s not what Dale Hunter does. Is it? That seems out of character. Doesn’t he almost have to come back one more year to complete the transition to his methods, then help pick the coach to follow him?”

Well, some will say it is what Dale Hunter does and what Dale Hunter did today. It won’t surprise those who detested him during his playing career as one of the most antagonistic players of his time, a cheapshot artist supreme of the highest — or lowest — order (here and here, for example). They’ll conclude that this is just another.

But let’s put ancient grudges and insults aside. In 2012, it’s quite possible that Hunter discovered that coaching in the NHL is not as easy as the OHL, that dealing with teenagers who thirst for the big time is light years from dealing with millionaires who have made the big time, some with their own business empires. It may be that he really just wants to return to London, Ontario, to be back on his farm with his family, and that the NHL life — the long travel, the days away from home, the pressures to win — doesn’t agree with someone who has been his own boss for more than a decade. That would be a plausible explanation — or perhaps a big part of a more complicated one.

Speaking to the media today (below), Hunter called it “a tough decision to make, but it was the right thing for me and my family….Weighing both sides, going home to the family, the family business, you know, outweighed it.”

He got the Capitals to buy into his ideas, and the players — who were rumored to be mutinous not long after he replaced the likeable Bruce Boudreau in November — grew to accept Hunter’s defense-first approach, especially once they qualified for the postseason and had some success against tough competition. Speaking today, Hunter said he felt the team started to accept his methods on March 8 in a comeback victory over Tampa Bay. Before that, he said he felt they were “trying to be too fancy, trying to outscore teams instead of trying to outplay teams.”

How completely they absorbed his lessons, however, was evident on the play that eliminated Washington on Saturday night, when Alex Ovechkin floated back to the bench after being knocked down while his check, Michael Del Zotto, scored the eventual game winner.

Afterward, a subdued Ovechkin took responsibility, saying that if he had played it Hunter’s way, he’d have hustled back to the bench and the goal might not have resulted. Blaming Ovechkin for the loss would be wrong. He was not the only Caps player who didn’t have his best outing on Saturday. Similarly, blaming him for Hunter’s decision would be wrong, too. It’s possible some will portray it as a direct consequence of a clash of style with the team’s biggest star, whose ice time Hunter cut dramatically in the playoffs. But big decisions in life are rarely that simple.

“It’s his decision so we have to live with it,” Ovie said.  How happily or unhappily the Capitals captain lives with it, only he knows. He did profess after Game 7 that this was the best Caps teams that he’d played on and he hoped everyone would be back. Ovechkin’s former and still-sometimes center Nick Backstrom said, “I really wanted to see (Hunter) back next year but unfortunately he’s not. It’s not good.”

Over the weekend, Tarik El-Bashir in The Washington Post summed up Hunter’s tenure, writing, “In six months, he accomplished something his predecessor could not: transform the Capitals into an accountable, resilient, defensively conscious team that, in theory, plays the perfect brand of hockey to succeed in the tight-checking playoffs, even if the low-scoring style is nerve-racking and unfulfilling to some.

“After some initial resistance, the majority of the players bought into Hunter’s philosophy and, in recent weeks, the dressing room and the coach seemed to be pulling in the same direction,” El-Bashir continued. ”On Thursday, locker room leader Brooks Laich responded, ‘Absolutely,’ when asked if he wanted Hunter to return. ‘He’s been great,’ Laich added.”

McPhee now has to find his third coach in less than half a year. What seemed like a promising beginning has ended rather quickly.

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Devils sniper Ilya Kovalchuk, who has been playing with a suspected bad back, must continue to be productive against New York’s tough defense and stellar goaltending. (Scott Levy/NHLI via Getty Images)

They’re not good neighbors, as we saw a few times this season, but that can make for great hockey when the Devils and Rangers hook up. Yes, there will be echoes of 1994, when New York won the Eastern Conference championship in the second overtime period of Game 7, but that was long ago. With the exception of Marty Brodeur, who is still in goal for the Devs, almost everything and everyone has changed, including the way each team plays: The Rangers are now the more defensive oriented club and the Devils are the team that might be stronger offensively. But both play a strong all-around game and this series will be a treat.

Whether the open warfare from the regular season carries over is uncertain — and we may find out right away in Game 1. The conventional wisdom is that this stuff doesn’t do much for your team in the playoffs (and it’s questionable how much it does in the regular season), but it’s not wise to expect anything conventional when these rivals get together. Even if the bad blood doesn’t bubble over the top, it will be there in every hit and every shift. Even the coaches have gotten into it this season. Most likely, the stuff that happens between the whistles and not after them will decide who moves on to play for the Stanley Cup.

NEW YORK RANGERS (1) vs. NEW JERSEY DEVILS (6)

Rangers — What they did right in the second round: – Their series-clinching seventh game against the Capitals on Saturday might have been their most impressive of the 14 matches they’ve played so far. The Rangers took Washington’s best players out of the game with excellent defense, especially on the backcheck and with strong backside pressure. And in the moments when they weakened, Henrik Lundqvist was there, making his case for why he’s hockey’s top goaltender. In the series as a whole, the Rangers’ defense corps was strong and solid, with Marc Staal (who is playing better every game) joining Ryan McDonagh, Dan Girardi and Michael Del Zotto in a formidable top four that not only defended well but contributed mightily to the offense. The Rangers got 4 goals and 14 points from their blueliners in the last round. Their mobility as a group helped jumpstart New York’s speed game. Along with all the other Blueshirts, they absorbed the pounding by the Caps’ physical forwards, didn’t allow it to disrupt their game, and emerged with no serious injuries.

In addition to the obvious contributions from their top forwards, the Rangers got strong two-way play from their depth guys like Ruslan Fedotenko and Artem Anisimov. That allowed John Tortorella play them and not over-rely on his top forwards and, in turn, that allowed New York to push the pace of the game. Exceptional penalty killing (16 of 20) was another strong element of their series. And, as always, there is Tortorella: willful, demanding and unrelenting, to whom his players have responded.

What they have to improve: New York’s power play went 4-for-25 against Washington, and that’s not good enough. It would be helpful, especially on the road, for Tortorella to work harder at getting his best forwards away from the opposition’s top defenders (in this round, that will be Marek Zidlicky and Bryce Salvador), but he doesn’t seem interested in deploying his players that way. Lundqvist’s catching glove side was targeted by the Caps’ shooters and exposed on long-range shots. Don’t think the Devils didn’t notice. Tortorella relied too much of his top four blueliners and runs the risk of burning them out. And it will be helpful for them advance from of this round in under seven games. Much has been made about the lack of success by playoff teams that go the limit in each of the first two rounds — none have won the Cup. While the Rangers are not worn down by travel, they play a physical brand of hockey, making and taking big hits and blocking shots. And, with their coach whipping them, every game is like a Game 7 and most are one- or two-goal decisions. They have no easy nights — they haven’t had any all season. The duress can take its toll, and New York’s first 14 playoff games could already feel like more. Or maybe this is just who the Rangers are and they can handle it.

What they’ll have to do to win this round: The Rangers are a better team when they play with the lead, so scoring first and holding on to it will be crucial.  The two most important elements for the Rangers may be faster puck movement to find shooting lanes while playing with the extra man and making quick first passes to break down the Devils’ strong forecheck and cycle game. Getting secondary scoring from the likes of Brandon Prust and Brian Boyle would be greatly beneficial as well. And, of course, Lundqvist must continue his excellent play against a very strong offensive team.

Devils — What they did right in the second round: Its best players have to be its best players for a team to have success in the postseason and, against the Flyers, the Devils’ best players were just that. With exemplary discipline, they resisted Philadelphia’s attempts to draw them into stupid penalties and get them off the ice and out of their flow. New Jersey’s hard forechecking game and ability to cycle the puck kept the Flyers bottled in their own zone and unable to get into their rhythm. The Devils’ penalty kill against the Flyers (15 of 20) was, at times, exceptional, rebounding from its poor performance in the first round against the Panthers. Credit some unsung heroes for their no-name defense — Mark Fayne, Andy Greene and Salvador — for excellent work when down a man. Salute great coaching by Larry Robinson for getting the Devs’ d-men to grow as a unit. In fact, coaching is one of New Jersey’s biggest strengths. Peter DeBoer shrewedly broke up his lines toward the end of the Flyers series, putting Patrik Elias with Zach Parise and David Clarkson on one line and Travis Zajac with Ilya Kovalchuk and Dainius Zubrus on another. That spread out the offense and put some size and physical presence on every line. Having a “hammer guy” on each helped keep the Flyers off-balance.

Goalie Martin Brodeur has steadily improved as the playoffs have gone on and his excellent puckhandling was a factor in not allowing the Flyers to get into their forecheck. It’s a big advantage he has over Lundqvist (and if the Devils can put the puck in places where Lundqvist has to handle it and make a play, those could be important situations for them).

What they have to improve: As well as he’s played, Brodeur still allows a few too many soft goals and must tighten up. Unlike the goalies New Jersey faced in earlier rounds, the one in this series has been making all the saves he should and a good number that he shouldn’t have, so Marty will have to be on top of his game. They Devils will also want more consistent production from their power play (4-for-18 against Philly). A little more offensive production from their secondary scorers and defensemen would help augment their attack.

What they have to do to win this round: It may be unavoidable, but the layoff between rounds could hurt the Devils in Game 1 against the Rangers and they may have to fight off their rust. Brodeur’s play must continue on its upward path, the penalty kill has to remain strong, and the Devils will want to get as much traffic as possible in front of Lundqvist. If they can score first, and build more than a one-goal lead, it could doom the Rangers who have averaged nearly one full goal per game less than New Jersey during the postseason so far. They’ll have to match the Rangers’ legitimate physical intensity (which wasn’t an issue posed by the Flyers) without taking penalties. Because his players are so defensively responsible, DeBoer won’t be afraid to put his best forwards out against the Rangers’ best, but they’ll have to work harder in establishing their forecheck and cycle than they did against the depleted Flyers. They’ll also have to figure out a way to avoid Rangers shotblocking. Perhaps most important, Kovalchuk will have to continue to fight through whatever is ailing him (suspected to be a bad back). He played remarkably well for someone who is less than 100 percent, which shows his character, his talent and how key he is to the Devils’ scheme of things.

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The Coyotes must do a better job of protecting goaltender Mike Smith through all three periods as the games will be close and the Kings have the firepower to strike late. ( Norm Hall/NHLI via Getty Images)

We move to the playoffs’ third round on Sunday, and anyone who tells you they predicted before the postseason began that the Coyotes and Kings would meet for a chance to advance to the Stanley Cup Final should not be trusted. But here they are, two unlikely foes that have both peaked at the right time, knocked off favored opponents, gotten timely scoring, and thrived on defense and stellar goaltending. Any team that combines those elements belongs in a conference championship series.

PHOENIX COYOTES (3) vs. LOS ANGLES KINGS (8)

Coyotes — What they did right in the second round: Playing with outstanding structure and showing phenomenal discipline, the Coyotes needed only five games to easily dispatch a Nashville team that some believed was destined to hoist the Cup in June. Internal problems didn’t help the Predators’ cause, but Coyotes coach Dave Tippett prepared his club well and it continued to play the style that got it past the Blackhawks in the first round. That involves keeping quality scoring chances to a minimum, relying on Mike Smith (who was better than Pekka Rinne) to make saves, preventing second chance opportunities, patiently waiting for the opposition to make mistakes and then capitalizing on them. Captain Shane Doan and Martin Hanzal each had two goals and two assists in the five games and Antoine Vermette had a goal and three assists.

The Phoenix defense corps, not known as big point producers, now boasts the top two scorers among D-men in the playoffs: Keith Yandle and Rusty Klesla (tied with the Rangers’ Dan Girardi). However, their play without the puck has been devastating. They don’t give up many odd man rushes and no matter where the Predators had the puck on the ice, the Coyotes were ready for them with layers of defenders to beat before they could get to the net or get off a shot. The Coyotes are not overly physical, they don’t play a mayhem-inducing game like the Flyers, but they’re not soft either. They just know where to be and don’t easily let you get through them.

Tippett has a team full of guys who aren’t flashy but they do lots of fundamental things well, from Boyd Gordon’s excellent work on face-offs, to the speed of Mikkel Boedker and Vermette, to the excellent two-way play of Hanzal, to the well-rounded game of Oliver Ekman-Larsson, to name a few. Most impressive was their penalty kill against the Preds, who had the best power play in the league during the regular season. Led by Gordon and Lauri Korpikoski, Phoenix didn’t allow a power play goal in the last three games of the series and none on the road. In fact, the Coyotes have not surrendered a power play goal on the road in the playoffs, helping to take those crowds out of games.

What they need to improve: As in their series against Chicago, the Coyotes still had some trouble keeping the Predators off the scoreboard late in games. They’ve surrendered nine third period goals through two rounds, as many as the Penguins and only one fewer than the Flyers and Capitals.

What they’ll need to do to win this round: The Coyotes will have to be more consistent in keeping the Kings away from Smith. The Kings have more high-skilled forwards than the Predators and the Coyotes can’t continue to allow their foes to force Smith to make 30-plus saves every game. They’ll have to improve their play late in games when they have a lead and figure out a way to neutralize the most important Kings: Anze Kopitar and Drew Doughty. But they won’t be making too many major adjustments. They’ll want to play the same game they’ve played in the last two rounds. It’s worked so far.

Kings — What they did right the second round: In sweeping the Blues, Los Angeles dominated the tempo and flow of their games. They surged at the right times, especially shorthanded, and got excellent goaltending from Jonathan Quick who, through the first two rounds, convinced many people that he could be the best goaltender in the game right now. The Kings got strong play from all four lines, led by their top threesome of Dustin Brown (2 goals, 4 assists against the Blues), Kopitar and Justin Williams. Drew Doughty really stepped up his game and was the series’ most dominant player. Kopitar (the most underappreciated star in the NHL) with Mike Richards, Jarret Stoll and Colin Fraser, gives L.A. a physically impressive group of centers and their play was contagious as the Kings’ overall physical game subdued St. Louis at every turn.

Under coach Darryl Sutter, L.A. keeps it simple: Win the battles in front of your net, in front of the other team’s net and along the boards, and play with pace. The Kings have a good leader in their captain Brown, who could be the most tenacious forechecker in the NHL. Like him, the forwards in general combine physical play with very good skill.

Doughty led a defense corps that may have surprised the Blues with its mobility. Rookie Slava Voynov is quick and smart, Alex Martinez has had a strong two rounds for a young player, and Matt Greene, Willie Mitchell and Rob Scuderi, a trio of rugged, old school blueliners, are not pylons out there the way rugged, old school blueliners once were.

What they need to improve: While the strength of the Kings’ game is playing at full strength, they had only one power play goal against the Blues and, with Phoenix’s penalty kill so strong, it’s an area that could lead to frustration. And because of their physical nature, the Kings can take some bad penalties.Their PK through two rounds has been even better than the Coyotes’, but they still would be better off staying out of the box.

What they’ll need to do to win this round: The Kings are going to have to play an intelligent game. It won’t be about dialing back their physicality as much as trying not to be over-aggressive and outmuscle the Coyotes. Phoenix is so smart and tactically aware that if the Kings open up against them, the Coyotes will exploit the holes in their defensive coverage. The way Los Angeles executes its physical play could be a deciding factor in this match between nasty Dogs and funky Kings.

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Hurts so good: Rangers defenseman Ryan McDonagh (27) takes one for his team by blocking a shot. (Bruce Bennett/Getty Images)

Is shotblocking ruining hockey? Judging by what some commentators are saying, you’d think so. They claim it has dampened the great skill of the game’s best players and diminished the entertainment factor of the playoffs. You’d also think it’s the main ingredient in teams winning or losing.

The Globe and Mail, among others, seems to have become obsessed with shotblocking. Last Friday, James Mirtle noted, “In these playoffs, teams have blocked an average of 31.6 shots per game, which is one of the highest marks since the league began tracking the stat back in 1998.” And he suggested, “Instead of the Dead Puck Era from just prior to the lockout maybe we can call this one the Blocked Puck Era.”

Well, that doesn’t seem particularly boring.

A day later, Roy MacGregor wrote in The Globe and Mail about the dominance of goaltending in the playoffs, which he acknowledged was nothing new. “What is new, however, is how the game is being played. It is so defence oriented that defencemen could check their e-mail before any opposing forward checks them. Whereas once a team might feature a single good shot blocker – hello, Bob Goldham – teams like the New York Rangers now insist on everyone trying to block every shot. The old mantra of ‘Let the goalie see the puck!’ has been replaced by new thinking that says it doesn’t matter if the goalie sees nothing, and if a puck should somehow get through, it will be stopped by one of two critical factors: a highly athletic goaltender’s sharp reflexes or, just as importantly, the goaltender’s size.

“And it’s working. Thirty years ago, in the scoring heyday, only rare goaltenders had a goals-against average below 3.00. This year there were dozens.”

On Wednesday, The Globe and Mail’s Bruce Dowbiggin went Mirtle one better and called this “the era of Robo Hockey.” He characterized it by a loss of identity in which the skilled players like Alex Ovechkin are no longer permitted to display their talents and reduced to throwing their bodies in front of pucks, just like the Jay Beagles of the world.

Dowbiggin writes, “Watching the coverage on HNIC, TSN and Sportsnet, Robo Hockey would seem to be the only approved way to win a Stanley Cup now. There are no team identities, no clashes of style between Vancouver and Boston. There are no skill players dominating (Washington’s Brooks Laich mocked them with a bilious “Is Alex Kovalev skilled? Where did that get him? You know?”)….There is an impenetrable goalie. There are five well-padded bodies in front of him blocking shots. Three opposing forwards storm the net and two defenceman blaze from the point. Sometimes a shot sneaks through. Most times, there are more blocks from defenders than from the goalie. Low-scoring games typically go to overtime, connoting the notion of excitement and parity when it is instead gridlock and stalemate. Change the names and jerseys and very few would notice. The league’s Hockey Operations department wants it thus.”

I don’t know. That seems pretty exciting to me.

Now to Thursday. After letting its readers soak up the threat to the sport that shotblocking poses, The Globe and Mail proposed a solution courtesy of former NHL coach Pierre Pagé: a new rule modeled on basketball’s three-in-the-key rule. This via Eric Duhatschek, who listened as Pagé proposed the idea during the Dead Puck Era, suggests that it be revived. “Under the Pagé plan,” he writes, “hockey could create a zone in front of the goaltender that perhaps only three, or even two, players a team could enter at the same time….Let’s say the NHL designated the area from the goal to the outer edges of the lower faceoff circles as hockey’s key. If you permitted only two defenders to enter that area at a time, you might see some creative plays down low instead of the gridlock we have now….

“Maybe you’d see more stick-handling,” Duhatschek adds. “Maybe you’d see more give-and-go’s. It might take some getting used to – defenders stationed outside the zone, waiting for an opportunity to counter. But it might also mean more action off the rush; if a team breaks up a play in the key and gets the puck ahead to one of its forwards, it theoretically should create more open-ice, odd-man opportunities, a part of the old NHL that seems to have been relegated to the Classic TV channels.

“The attempt to unclog the area in front of the goalie would break the glassy-eyed sameness of what we have now – a game dominated by netminding and team defence, in which virtually every goal seems to come off a cycle down low and requires that the puck carom to a player in a shooting position, usually off a deflected pass. There is so much more randomness and luck involved in scoring a goal than pure offensive brilliance and it’s not because of a lack of skill. The skilled players just don’t have enough room to demonstrate those talents.”

In Duhatschek’s view, “What’s on display in these playoffs isn’t hockey, it’s pinball.” And he goes on to wonder if shotblocking is good for the game, citing safety issues and the reduced entertainment value, noting that the five best teams in the Western Conference have been eliminated and the two left standing, the Coyotes and Kings, are defense-first juggernauts.

Once upon a time, the shotblocker was a hero, a brave individual, the crazy guy who was willing to sacrifice his body for his team. The most recent poster boy for that craziness was Ian Laperriere.

And that pretty much ended his career. If a club had a couple of players as undaunted as Laperriere, it was a bonus. The Canadiens of the late ’80s, for example, had center Guy Carbonneau and defenseman Craig Ludwig. The former would time his legs-first slides perfectly, the latter had huge shinguards under his socks. They were later reunited in Dallas. But a pair of shotblockers was considered a luxury.

Now, everyone on a team — well, at least teams like the Rangers and Capitals — is expected to block shots. And in these playoffs, some are beginning to equate shotblocking with success. The graphics on the TV screen display the number of shots a team blocks right under the final score, and the game stories in the paper and on the internet tell the same tale while elevating this stat to prime significance. So in Wednesday night’s Game 6, it was 2-1 Capitals and in almost the next breath we learn that the Caps had blocked 24 shots to the Rangers’ mere 6. In the previous game, one the Blueshirts won in near-miraculous fashion with two late power play goals, Washington blocked 29, New York 19.

But do blocked shots really explain why the Caps have hung in there against the Rangers? Should this one facet of the game get so much attention? How about Rangers coach John Tortorella’s unwillingness (or inability) to get his most talented line of Carl Hagelin, Brad Richards and Marian Gaborik  away from the Capitals’ excellent shutdown trio of Troy Brouwer, Matt Hendricks and Joel Ward? What about the Capitals figuring out that Rangers goalie Henrik Lundqvist plays so deep in his crease that he’s not always able to cut off the high glove side shooting angle? Should we neglect all the minutes that Tortorella has loaded on his top defense pair of Ryan McDonagh and Dan Girardi, and on captain Ryan Callahan, as well as the toll that amount of playing time has taken on them? (In this TSN video, analyst Marc Crawford breaks down the Rangers’ early penalty kill in Game 6 and shows how some sloppy play by McDonagh and Callahan led to Alex Ovechkin’s game opening goal, a play that set the tone for the night).

In Game 6 on Wednesday night, Ovechkin was anything but a Robo Hockey player. He was his old dynamic self, maybe even more so. He put out a full effort, blocking shots as well finding soft spots in the Rangers’ defensive zone coverage, making marvelous plays and attempting desperation shots while at full extension.

Perhaps it is Ovechkin’s own Give-a-Damn quotient that has, on some nights, reduced his play to anonymity, not the demand that he block shots.

The playoffs have always been about defense. Look at the history of Stanley Cup champions and you see a list of great defensive teams. Even the run-and-gun Oilers of the ’80s had to become a better club in their own end before starting to win their multiple Cup championships. MacGregor is right to say that the emphasis on shotblocking is relatively new. It arose as a result of the two-line pass returning, which rendered the neutral zone trap far less effective than before the lockout. Now teams back up and defend in their own zone. Ridding the game of clutching and grabbing also prevented defenders from wrestling down forwards in front of the net. So the best way to defend is get in the lanes and block shots.

But anyone who equates today’s game with the boredom engendered by the neutral zone trap needs to have their pulse checked. True, there is a certain predictability and sameness to the way some teams play, damming the slot, keeping shooters to the outside and forcing the attacking team to pass the puck around, endlessly it seems at times, until they can find a shooting lane. But a rule restricting the movements of players would, it seems to me, be a wrench in the game’s gears, transforming flow into spasm and hockey into, well, basketball. One of my least favorite rules in the NHL now is the trapezoid, precisely because it does just that — it restricts the ability of the goaltender to play the puck. It punishes a skill. Well, shotblocking is a skill and one that encapsulates some of hockey’s most revered qualities: the sacrifice for team, the courage needed to play the game at high speeds, the element of danger.

Playoff hockey isn’t supposed to be pretty. It doesn’t have to be ugly, as it was in the first round, but the randomness that can characterize a scoring play in the postseason, what Duhatschek called “pinball hockey” is hardly new. Playoff goals have always been the result of hard work and fighting through defenses. And the bumps, bruises and cuts that winning the Stanley Cup requires is one of the elements that makes it so difficult. Blocking shots is a big part of that. Why lose a good thing?

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High-priced goalie Ilya Bryzgalov is the obvious scapegoat, but the Flyers’ demise was a true team effort. (Len Redkoles/NHLI via Getty Images)

There’s no brotherly love in Philadelphia today. All three of the city’s major sports teams dropped games on Tuesday night: the Phillies blowing a 4-0 lead to the Mets, the 76ers failing to clinch their series against Chicago, and the Flyers being eliminated by the Devils. That last one is, as hosts Mike and Ike said on their WIP Radio midday show, “the deepest wound of all.”

What hurts the most, Mike and Ike told their listeners, is that Flyers fans fully expected their team to beat the Devils, that allegedly nondescript team from that nondescript neighboring state. After the Flyers dispatched the hated Penguins in their tumultuous first round series, the Orange Army had their sights set further ahead, to the Eastern Conference Final where they would take on the hated Rangers or the hated Capitals. They’d be one step away from a trip to the Stanley Cup Final. And why not? The Penguins were, most believed, the favorites to win the Cup. Fans’ emotions often get the better of them in that way, making them feel like they know what is truly unknowable — and everyone should know by now that this year’s playoffs are the most unknowable of all.

The real problem for the Flyers, however, was that their fans weren’t the only ones who discounted the Devils. The players did as well. Mike and Ike played postgame remarks by Claude Giroux, the Flyers’ de facto captain, in the dressing room after the game. Wearing his street clothes because he’d been suspended, Giroux confessed to a battery of hand-held microphones that his team suffered from overconfidence heading into the second round (video). “I think we were thinking we were going to walk over New Jersey and it’s kind of our fault a little bit,” he said. “I guess we’ve gotta learn from it. They’re a good hockey team. They’re well-balanced and they played a pretty good series.”

We can applaud Giroux’s honesty here, but the fact remains that the guy coach Peter Laviolette called the “best player in the world” after the Pittsburgh series fell short in the leadership department, not only by setting a poor example in taking undisciplined frustration penalties against the Devils, an example his teammates followed, but also failing to recognize and warn against the hubris that infected the Flyers. Now humbled, indeed it’s a lesson for him and for them.

By no means, however, are Giroux’s shortcomings the only reason the Flyers will be cleaning out their lockers this week. This was a collective failure. As they did so well to distract the Penguins, they trash talked and tried to bully the Devils, attempting to get them into scrums after whistles and pull them out of their game. Whether that was a conscious tactic coming down from the coaching staff or something the players initiated on their own, it didn’t work. By contrast, the Devils’ players maintained after Game 5 that their coaching staff insisted upon them keeping their composure.

“Discipline,” said forward Patrik Elias when asked the key to the series (video), “not to get dragged into any kind of altercations after the whistle and hitting and all that stuff.”

“Stay disciplined,” goalie Martin Brodeur echoed (quoted by Rich Chere in The Newark Star-Ledger). “You could talk about scoring goals, forechecking them and playing well and all that, but I think what was tough on them was us not retaliating to any of the stuff they were doing and all the stuff they were saying every single game. Guys just turned away and didn’t respond to anybody. They were able to get Pittsburgh all wrapped up in that stuff. It must’ve gotten tough on them a little bit to just talk to themselves all day long.” And that, as well as the Devils’ superiority at actually playing hockey, likely frustrated the Flyers even more.

There’s more: In each of the Flyers’ four losses, they scored the first goal, which means whatever strength they had at the beginning of each game dissipated as it went on. They proved incapable of holding the lead and were not resilient enough to get it back. The team that looked so formidable against the Penguins, that deluded itself into believing the Devils series would be easy pickings, failed to establish its style of play in the second round. The Devils’ fierce forecheck kept the Flyers bottled up in their own end and seemingly lacking the strength and willpower to effectively push back. Giroux’s line with Scott Hartnell and Jaromir Jagr did very little against New Jersey, unless you count Giroux and Hartnell taking bad penalties and Jagr looking like he was out of gas. The secondary scoring vanished. The battered and bruised defense corps, which put up a brave front against Pittsburgh’s elite forwards, crumbled. It’s a fair question to ask whether that crazy Penguins series took too much out of the Flyers, too much emotion, too much energy, and replaced it with too much confidence.

But since our scapegoating culture always looks to single out a particular culprit when things go wrong, it’s little surprise that eccentric goalie Ilya Bryzgalov took the most abuse from the fans who phoned into WIP. Frank Servalli of The Philadelphia Daily News did his part by calling Game 5 a “Bryzaster,” not inappropriate considering the game-winning goal by David Clarkson:

That series-signature moment is destined to be on TV blooper segments forever (a worthy addition to  TSN’s top goalie gaffes), and it looks bad on the Flyers’ goalie, but over Hockey Night in Canada, analyst Garry Galley also recognized Kimmo Timonen’s culpability for the blunder.

“Another Flyers season ends, and with a searing, haunting image,” writes Jack McCaffery in The Delaware County Times. “How many have there been? There was Bob Clarke, often, caught standing in his VIP box, peering down on an emptying building, barely moving. There was Brian Boucher, blasting Bill Barber, the coach. There was Leon Stickle, not making a call. There was Eric Lindros skulking out of Joe Louis Arena. The searing image of the (Patrick) Kane goal will be tough to top — particularly because it was unacceptably soft in an overtime of a Cup-deciding game. But it will take years — years, years and years — before Bryzgalov sheds the image of handing the puck to Clarkson in a 1-1 hockey game in such a charitable fashion that he should have been credited with an assist. Of course, he is under contract to the Flyers for eight more years. So he can take his time.”

Bryzgalov’s inconsistency all season will certainly make him a focal point when discussions turn to how the Flyers can improve next season. If it wasn’t for the Maple Leafs’ decades of playoff futility, the oldest joke in hockey would be the Flyers’ chronic goaltending problems. Bryzgalov – despite the massive contract that paid him an obscene $15 million this season, bonuses included — is the latest punch line. Anyone who looked at his flimsy playoff history might have guessed that would be the case before the Flyers pulled the trigger to acquire him. He surrendered three goals or more in 10 of their 11 postseason games this spring and sported a garish save percentage of .887, worst among all playoff netminders except Pittsburgh’s Marc-Andre Fleury. Barring some unforseen turnaround in which he plays an entire season like he did in March, Bryzgalov is not the solution. But the Flyers are stuck with him. He is untradeable, representing $5.66 million in cap space, not that any team looking for a goaltender would want him at half the price.

Even with an unpredictable goalie, this might have been a different series had the Flyers’ defense corps been at full strength. But Chris Pronger was gone most of the season, perhaps never to return. Timonen was heroic, but banged up and he may not be back next year. Andrej Meszaros, out since early March after back surgery, only returned for Game 5. Nicklas Grossmann missed a couple of playoff games and played with an upper body injury. Late season pickup Pavel Kubina was also slowed by an upper body injury and looked just plain slow for the pace of these playoffs. Braydon Coburn, however, played perhaps the best hockey of his career and any rebuilding that this defense corps undergoes may revolve around him.

The Flyers’ forwards are a very good group and most likely not an area for tinkering by GM Paul Holmgren. Yes, Mike Richards and Jeff Carter are going to the next round in L.A. but Holmgren picked up Brayden Schenn, Wayne Simmonds, Jakub Voracek and the draft pick that became Sean Couturier in exchange for those two players and that’s a very good return. But those four are youngsters and, like their teammates, they also emerged from the head-on collision against Pittsburgh messed up, believing that their next foe would fall easily in front of them. As it turned out, beating the Penguins was the Flyers’ Stanley Cup.

Wonder if Zimmy had that “5″ Royales song in mind when he wrote this:

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After less than a thousand showed up at a “Save the Coyotes” rally in 2009, fans are now flocking to Jobing.com Arena to witness the team’s stirring but unlikely playoff run. (Christian Petersen/Getty Images)

It was a day of big possibilities in Glendale, and unless the Coyotes go on to win the Stanley Cup, May 7 could go down as the biggest date in the franchise’s NHL history, both in Arizona and Manitoba. Not only is it the day that this team reached the conference championship round for the first time, but there were some strong signs that, after years of ownership uncertainty — three of those years under the caretaker stewardship of the league itself — some stability might be ahead.

Just like the Coyotes’ chances of going all the way, the team’s sale to Greg Jamison’s group is no sure thing. Regardless, it was momentous evening for hockey in Arizona.

Everyone always wants to count the Coyotes out, both on and off the ice. Few expected them to survive against the Blackhawks or Predators, just as few expected them to win the Pacific Division or even make the playoffs. Stunted expectations are an annual thing for this club. And few expected they’d still be playing in Glendale in 2012, with yearly predictions of relocation or even a shuttering of the franchise a fixture in the media on both sides of the border — especially among those who abhor the notion of a hockey club in the desert.

How a team manages to stay focused amidst non-stop rumors of its demise is something of a minor miracle. How it continues to win on a limited budget and often in front of sparse crowds (although not recently) is even bigger. Whatever plaudits have been directed at GM Don Maloney and coach Dave Tippett are insufficient. Together they have made this orphan club a winner, far more than merely respectable, and figured out how to keep the constant rumors from being a distraction.

The hockey that this team plays is not pretty. “Coyote ugly,” was how their MVP goalie Mike Smith put it in one postgame interview and that’s accurate. Tippett’s own words about the 2-1 series clincher against Nashville provided all you need to know: “We made it muddy down front of our net and the mud won out at the end.”

At one point during the game, which seemed to meander aimlessly in the second period with Phoenix up by a goal, I began counting each team’s run of completed passes. The Predators rarely could string more than two or three together before a Coyote player broke it up– and the first one was often an uncontested D to D pass. Phoenix was more able to put three or four passes together before a Nashville player interrupted their flow. Long stretches of the game looked like that, but the Coyotes were able to penetrate more effectively and eventually it paid off for them when they put these three passes together for the game winner:

You can see all the mud in front of the net. You also see a full Jobing.com Arena, which you didn’t see often during the regular season — the Coyotes had the lowest average attendance in the NHL — or even in the earlier stages of the playoffs. And that, more than anything, symbolizes the hope and fear for this club going forward.

It’s no secret that Glendale is an awful location for an NHL team in this large market — the 12th biggest in the U.S. — and the story of how the Coyotes ended up there is now an old one as well as irreversible. It’s in Glendale, in the western part of the Phoenix Valley far from the area’s wealth and potential fan base in the east where, unable to lure fans, the franchise has annually bathed in a tub of red ink estimated at between $20 and $25 million. But, at the league’s longstanding insistence, it’s in Glendale where the franchise will continue to make its stand, fighting off elaborate efforts to spirit the club elsewhere.

Here’s another area where things have gotten muddy and it has had nothing on the way Dave Tippett coaches: A series of potential owners has been unable to figure out how to make the numbers work. It’s a situation complicated by a variety of factors besides low attendance. The City of Glendale financed and owns the arena and has its own fiscal challenges with which to contend. The city requires a lease from the club that won’t push Glendale further into financial peril. Those who would own the Coyotes, recognizing the attendance and related revenue problems plus Glendale’s need for an anchor tenant in the building, have tried various creative solutions to get the city to help cover their potential losses. That has led to objections from the local conservative watchdog group, the Goldwater Institute, which claims that the Arizona constitution prohibits the excessive use of public money for private enterprise. A potential bond issue last year was scuttled because of the Goldwater Institute’s threat of a legal challenge.

For a while this year, it seemed as if the Coyotes had run out of options and that got the citizens of Quebec and Seattle pretty excited. Even the NHL acknowledged in March that if progress wasn’t made soon on a sale, the league would have to consider relocation. But progress apparently was made and, on Monday, Jamison and Gary Bettman met the press to give an update. There’s no deal yet, but they have a preliminary agreement; the sale can’t happen until Jamison’s group secures the necessary financing and formalizes his purchase agreement with the league, and that involves negotiating a lease with Glendale that gets approved by the city council. The NHL Board of Governors must also bless it all.

Just who Jamison’s partners are has yet to be revealed, and you might think it strange that anyone would want to own a team that seems fated to continually lose mountains of money. But Glendale, fearful that it could end up with an arena without a major sports team to occupy it, apparently will fork over about $14.5 million annually for 20 years to the club in order to manage the building for the city. Or at least that is the plan that will go before the city council. Jamison and Bettman say this deal will be structured in such a way that they don’t anticipate the Goldwater Institute being able to interfere. The Goldwater people aren’t so sure.

Meanwhile, the best thing that could happen is happening: the Coyotes are winning and the building is full. How much of that is bandwagon jumping to follow the excitement of a team making a deep playoff run? Hard to say. It’s difficult to forget the images of a mere 200 to 500 (depending on which report you believed) fervent fans attending the “Save the Coyotes” rally in 2009.

By contrast, when the original Jets were about to leave Winnipeg in 1995, around 55,000 fans rallied to save them.

Regardless, it’s heartening to see the “Whiteout” at Jobbing.com. Whether that translates into season tickets, corporate sponsorships and the other types of long-term support that the Coyotes will require to erase all the doubts about their future, we won’t know for a while.

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Though Dainius Zubrus of the Devils ultimately wasn’t injured, the headshot he received from Claude Giroux (not pictured) was egregious enough to merit a disciplinary hearing. (Bruce Bennett/Getty Images)

Will the NHL show courage and suspend Claude Giroux for Game 5 of the Flyers’ series against the Devils? A disciplinary hearing took place on Monday morning and Giroux certainly deserves a ban for targeting the head of the Devils’ Dainius Zubrus late in the second period of Sunday’s Game 4, which New Jersey won, 4-2, to push Philadelphia to the brink of elimination. But to remove Philly’s best player from the lineup in a potential elimination game would be a bold a move for Brendan Shanahan and the league’s Department of Player Safety. It would, however, show that they’ve learned from an earlier mistake.

UPDATED: The NHL has suspended Giroux for one game. Here is the league’s statement and Shanahan’s video explanation.

First, here’s the incident in question:

Giroux got a two-minute minor for an illegal check to the head, a violation of good ol’ Rule 48. Flyers partisans can try to justify and rationalize this hit all they want, but there’s no denying that is was the action of a frustrated player who didn’t like the way the game was going for his team and was upset that the referees had failed to call a penalty on Marty Brodeur for handling the puck outside of the trapezoid (not seen on this video). That’s what Giroux is complaining about to the ref in the video just before he goes after Zubrus.

The irony is that the kind of frustration that Giroux displays here mirrors Sidney Crosby’s and the Penguins’ during their first round series against the Flyers. They took foolish penalties when things weren’t going the way they had envisioned. It became pretty clear as Sunday’s Game 4 proceeded that the Flyers are now displaying the same lack of discipline. It’s a big postseason truism:  If you want to succeed, you’ve got to play through adversity when things go against you, not succumb to it.

Let’s look at the hit more closely. It’s late, no doubt about it. Zubrus had long since gotten rid of the puck. And it’s a hit to the head. The right play here would be for Giroux to go shoulder to shoulder with Zubrus, rub him into the boards and separate him from the puck. That’s not what he does, however. He gets slightly ahead of Zubrus and thrusts his shoulder into Zubrus’ head. In the parlance of hockey discipline, he “picked” the head.

The way the league judges this sort of hit has to do with whether the check is a full bodycheck, one administered to the core of the puckcarrier’s body. It’s the checker’s responsiblity to avoid making the head the principal point of contact, and if he gets the body as well as the head, the league will cut him some slack. That’s how the Senators’ Chris Neil got away with his check on Brian Boyle in the first round — and we aren’t particularly in favor of that standard when the head is targeted regardless, as we’ve stated here before, but that’s the way it is at the moment. Regardless, that’s not what happened in Giroux’s hit on Zubrus.

Those who believe that Giroux should be excused because Zubrus was bent over and his head was lowered are going to be surprised if Shanahan does not agree. As we’ve seen before when there’s a check to the head, the guideline is whether the player who is hit changes the position of his head just prior to or simultaneous with the delivery of the hit. That’s been the standard for headchecks from the outset. If you look at Zubrus’ head, it’s in the same lowered position the entire time, meaning Giroux saw where it was the entire time and didn’t avoid it. If the head doesn’t move, the onus is on the checker to not make it the principle point of contact. Giroux did.

Both aspects of the hit — picking the head and it being lowered — were essential aspects of the ruling that Shanahan made during the regular season on Montreal’s Max Pacioretty who targeted Pittsburgh’s Kris Letang. Here’s his explanation of that when he gave Pacioretty: a three-game vacation in November.

Three outstanding factors remain in the Giroux incident. The first is that Zubrus wasn’t seriously injured on the play. Lots of people (including us) don’t like injury, especially the lack thereof, weighing as heavily as it does on NHL discipline, but it remains an important ingredient. And yet, we saw in Shanahan’s decision to suspend the Coyotes’ Rusty Klesla for Monday’s Game 5 against the Predators after his Game 4 hit on Nashville’s Matt Halischuk (video) that the lack of injury is not always a factor in letting a perpetrator walk free. If the infraction is considered bad enough, the culprit is going to sit anyway.

The same thing applies to the second factor: the player’s history as an offender. Listening to Shanahan’s ruling, it’s clear that Klesla’s suspension for a different infraction five years ago was considered a minor, even unimportant piece in the decision against him. Giroux has no history of suspensions or fines, and while that might work in his favor, if the headshot on Zubrus is considered bad enough, his clean record may only reduce but not erase a possible suspension.

Finally, there is the political factor, one that has nothing to do with the infraction itself. Does Shanny have the will to remove the Flyers’ best player for a game in which they are fighting for their playoff lives? It’s a tough call, made even tougher by the fact that Flyers owner Ed Snider is one of the most influential in the NHL. You’d hope that wouldn’t be part of Shanahan’s thinking, but one can only guess at how much of a role it will play.

As the playoffs have proceeded, the outrageous, excessive behavior of the first week has declined while the games have been no less physical, intense and competitive. The fact that Shanahan declined to suspend Nashville’s best player, Shea Weber, on the first night of the tournament after he rammed Detroit’s Henrik Zetterberg into the glass fueled the turmoil that followed. Shanny’s got a second chance now and maybe he’ll get this one right.

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Brian Elliott’s sudden reversal of form is the last thing the Blues need in their 0-3 hole against the Kings. (Harry How/Getty Images)

It’s a cruel world in which goalies live. The numbers may tell us they haven’t been this good since the days of Georges Vezina, George Hainsworth, Tiny Thompson and Frank Brimsek but — then as now — gaudy regular season stats are meaningless when the playoffs roll around. The Blues’ Brian Elliott may have posted eye-popping numbers between October and the first round, like a 1.56 goals-against average and .940 save percentage, but in his last three games against the Kings, his  performance has been abysmal and will likely leave a lasting impression.

Goals like the one that Mike Richards scored against Elliott on Thursday night aren’t supposed to happen against top NHL netminders, unless they are Roberto Luongo.

At the other end of the ice, the Kings’ Jonathan Quick has been making the case that he may be the best goalie in the game, but when he uncharacteristically let a puck slip from his glove, Anthony Stewart promptly banged it home (video) in the third period, drawing the desperate Blues to within a goal. It proved that in the stress of the postseason, even the best can have shaky moments.

That’s playoff hockey, where the heightened level of competition can turn any little glitch into a blunder. Take the Devils’ overtime game-winning goal on Thursday night against the Flyers, a contest in which the goaltending by both Marty Brodeur and Ilya Bryzgalov proved a bit leaky. The winner was started with great determination by Ilya Kovalchuk, whose excellent vision enabled him to see the Flyers leaving themselves vulnerable on a bad line change and resulted in Alex Ponikarovski chopping a backhander past Bryzgalov, a rebound of his own shot. Here it is from CNBC:

Digesting the game afterward on the NHL Network, former NHL goalie Kevin Weekes broke down Ponikarovski’s goal and the bio-mechanics of how Bryzgalov moved, and explained how the Flyers’ goalie messed up the rebound. It was all in the way Bryzgalov held his stick, Weekes said, even though the shot that resulted in the rebound was on the glove side. Had Bryz not dragged the stick behind him when he moved right-to-left and kept in front of him, his body would have been more erect and he would have been able to close off the short side.

Here’s the goal again, from the CBC telecast this time, and it has the overhead view, which helps illustrate Weekes’ point.

Modern goaltending has become highly technical, even scientific, in an effort to minimize mistakes. Goalies used to rely on their athleticism, courage and reflexes to get the job done. Now, it’s more about their technique. Cam Cole of The Vancouver Sun spoke this week with former NHL goalie Bill Ranford, who won the Conn Smythe Trophy as Stanley Cup MVP in 1990 with the Oilers and is now the Kings’ goalie coach and Quick’s guru. In discussing his pupil’s growth, Ranford told Cole that he saw aspects of himself when he began working with Quick five seasons ago in the ECHL:

“He was all athletic. I know … pot calling the kettle black, right? It gets very tiring, fatigue sets in in your legs, and it’s hard on your body, so I had first-hand knowledge of it. We felt it was important to bring a little more technical aspect to his game, and just calm his game down a little bit so he’d be in position for the second save. He put in a lot of time and effort with the technical part, understanding the game better, reading plays — and now the athletic side of it is a secondary asset, a go-to asset when it’s needed.”

Quick learned quickly. “Unbelievable,” said Ranford, who is now 45. “My first year in Reading, we’d work on something in the morning and he’d apply it that night. I could never do that, but he did.”

Because of the fundamental role of goalies in the sport and the paramount importance that their play takes on in the postseason, what they do and how they do it is more closely scrutinized and hotly debated than the work of any of their teammates. The demands on them are extreme and it was no surprise to hear the Rangers’ Henrik Lundqvist say after his team’s victory over the Capitals in the third overtime period on Wednesday night that the pressures are more mental than physical. “You have to keep reminding yourself to not have a letdown or make bad decisions out there,” he said. “After the fourth period, it’s all in your head. How far can you push yourself?

“My entire body is exhausted right now, not so much from moving around, but from keeping my focus for so long,” he continued. “It’s exhausting. All it takes is a stupid mistake or a bad bounce and it’s over. That’s the toughest part. You have to stay sharp.”

It was Lundqvist’s first overtime victory since 2007. He lost seven straight in the interim.

Fortunately for goalies, they now have the benefit of coaches who are specifically assigned to assist them, a development that didn’t take place on a wide scale until about 25 years ago. In the Original Six era, there was no such thing as a goalie coach — and one of the more openly antagonistic relationships in the NHL of the 1950s was between Rangers goalie Gump Worsley and the Blueshirts’ coach, Phil Watson. They routinely traded insults in the newspapers. Netminders were on their own when it came to technical and psychological support, and it’s likely the reason why stories abound about the eccentricities of guys who played that position back in the day. Quirky minds like Bryzgalov’s were, at one time, the rule among goalies.

Things have come a long way since Jacques Plante wrote the first book on goaltending technique in 1972, and the advent of the goaltender coach is one of the biggest changes. Ranford’s work with Quick is mirrored by others: Sean Burke in Phoenix has helped Mike Smith’s rise this season. Despite his struggles in this round, Elliott has benefitted greatly this season from working with Blues goalie coach Corey Hirsch. Mitch Korn’s work has helped elevate Nashville’s Pekka Rinne into an elite goaltender.

One of the greatest coach-goalie partnerships ever is that of Martin Brodeur and Jacques Caron, who left his full-time spot with the Devils this season but has remained a consultant. Caron will retire after this season, but in 1980 he opened one of the first summer hockey schools devoted exclusively to goaltending and his impact on Brodeur’s career is incalculable. Brodeur calls him a second father (and his own, Denis, was also a fine amateur netminder for Canada’s national team).

Even before Caron began working with Brodeur in 1993, Francois Allaire and Patrick Roy formed a fruitful partnership. Because of Roy’s popularization of the butterfly style (a technique developed by Glenn Hall of the Blackhawks in the Original Six era and one that Allaire advocated), that duo may be the most influential goalie-coach tandem in hockey history.

Plante, himself, became one of the first NHL goalie coaches when he signed on with the Flyers to work with Bernie Parent, who had been his teammate on the Maple Leafs in the early ’70s. During a stretch in which he was playing poorly, Parent contemplated retirement until Plante observed him for a couple of days, noticed he was back on his heels, made the adjustment that got Bernie back on his game.

That sort of interaction is commonplace now and it has made goaltending infinitely better. Today’s members of the goalies’ union are more able to cope and adjust to the pressure associated with the playoffs, but it’s still a pressure that few have ever known.

The Blues hope to get defenseman Alex Pietrangelo back from his injuries, but it will take a team-wide effort to get St. Louis out of its surprising funk vs. the Kings. (Andrew D. Bernstein/NHLI via Getty Images)

What a curious little theme we’ve had going recently in the second round of the Stanley Cup playoffs — addition by subtraction. The Devils were forced to play without sniper Ilya Kovalchuk and came up with a fine road performance in beating the Flyers 4-1 on Tuesday. The Capitals cut into Alex Ovechkin’s ice time in Monday’s Game 2 and beat the Rangers 3-2 (although he was certainly out there a lot in Game 3′s near-doubleheader loss to New York). The Predators, playing poorly and down 2-0 in games to the Coyotes, suspended their two top scorers for Wednesday’s Game 3 at home and pulled off one of their trademark textbook  victories, a 2-0 Pekka Rinne shutout.

Unfortunately, it didn’t work that way for the Blues earlier this week. They were without their best defenseman — maybe their best player — in Alex Pietrangelo for Game 2 at home against the Kings, and rather than respond positively to the adversity, they played their worst period in memory, falling behind 4-0, never recovering, and ultimately losing 5-2. Now, they must skate in Los Angeles for the next pair, and the upstart Kings have a chance to put them in the sleeperhold.

Pietrangelo is recovering from a pair of knocks he suffered in Game 1, a leg injury and what is being termed concussion-like symptoms (no one seems to want to call it a concussion) caused by this hit from Dwight King, and that’s when everything started going sour for the Blues.

King was assessed only a minor penalty and not suspended by the league. The shorthanded goal that Matt Greene scored turned out to be the Game 1 winner, and in Game 2, King was invited to participate in a vengeance fight with B.J. Crombeen in which King the King — a much bigger guy — had no trouble. That scrap probably helped add to LA’s first period momentum, reversing whatever galvanizing effect the Blues might have thought they’d gained from it.

The good news for the Blues is that Pietrangelo may be able to go in Game 3. The bad news is the hole they have dug for themselves may be too deep.

The Blues can’t think that way. Their coach, Ken Hitchcock, spun the reminder that Sunday’s debacle was only one loss, and that they had played well in the second and third periods (audio). It was that first period, however, that may turn out to be the defining stretch of this entire series by the time it’s through. Four goals in one stanza from the supposedly offensively anemic Kings against the NHL’s best defensive club is something of a mind-blower, especially in the supposed tight-checking playoffs. But only one team was checking in the early going — the road team.

“Full marks to them: Their emotional investment in the first period was greater than ours,” Hitchcock said. “We’ve got to invest a lot more early in the game. And, like I said, that’s the nice part of the payoffs. It’s only one game, one loss and you move on.” Still, St. Louis’ effort in the first 20 minutes was bad enough to cause CNBC analyst Mike Keenan to savage the Blues’ players during the first intermission, saying that they were not prepared to play. It was a harsh indictment for any team coached by Hitchcock. With the score 5-1 after the second period, Keenan wasn’t much nicer (video). “They’re not even involved in this game,” he said. And he also doled out some deserved praise for the play of the Kings, especially their excellent top line of Dustin Brown, Anze Kopitar and Justin Williams, who dominated the contest.

Praise should also have gone to Dustin Penner, who used his big frame to stun the Blues in the first minute, helping to set up the opening goal by Mike Richards and exploiting the absence of Pietrangelo. Hitchcock started Barret Jackman and Kevin Shattenkirk, and Penner easily bodied Shattenkirk aside to help create the tally.

Playing physically is not something that is normally associated with Penner, who Helene Elliott of The Los Angeles Times called “seemingly unmotivatable.” But that’s the kind of emotional investment of which Hitchcock spoke. The coach also lamented his team’s costly turnovers, like the one by Carlo Colaiacovo that led to yet another shorthanded goal by the Kings, their fourth of the postseason.

“We’re trying to force offense when its not there,” Hitchcock said. “They’re pressing up and we’ve got to make them turn…When you force offense, you try to play east-west. Against this team, they check too well.”

The Blues didn’t check at all. By the late stages of the first period they had also seemingly stopped skating as Penner took a face-off win and broke in with Jeff Carter, who became the first beneficiary…

…and Kopitar, as the period neared conclusion, again tallied while the Blues just watched.

If another team this spring has had a worse 20 minutes, I can’t recall it. “It’s embarrassing the way we came out in the first period,” Jackman said.

If Pietrangelo does come back, the Blues can’t view him as the one-man cavalry riding to their rescue. He alone won’t be enough to remedy what’s ailing them. Their entire defense corps looks discombobulated and they’ve gotten too little production from some key forwards like T.J. Oshie (0 goals, 3 assists), Alex Steen (1 goal, 2 assists) and David Perron (1 goal, 3 assists). And Brian Elliott, who couldn’t come up with big saves to stop the bleeding, won’t be getting relief from Jaroslav Halak, who is still sidelined with an ankle injury.

Meanwhile, everything is going right for the Kings, starting with goalie Jonathan Quick and radiating out from there. Brown and Richards, the two spark plugs, have fired up a team that too often this season looked disinterested when it didn’t look confused. The Kings’ clear physical dominance of first the Canucks and now the Blues — the West’s top two regular season teams — has made it look as if those who called them the NHL’s biggest underachievers all season were right.

So it’s up to the Blues now to turn in a full effort on enemy ice or this one could be another short series for Los Angeles. Considering how well St. Louis played for most of the season, this is the first serious calamity that Hitchcock’s young club has faced and it will be a big test to see if it can rediscover its confidence and focus that made it one of the NHL’s best stories of 2011-12.

“We’ve had times in the season where we’ve all bought in, and we’ve had times when we’re half in, half out,” said captain David Backes, “That’s where we are right now. … Enough is enough, and we’ve got to determine as a group if we’re going to attack this thing, or if we’re going to tuck tail and run.”

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