Eric Engels

They're going to be on top of that.

Um,

But, yeah, that little hold from Newhook, which if you go back to the Buffalo series, the Sabres did a really good job holding the Canadians up so they couldn't get fully into their forecheck.

You didn't see Anderson blowing up guys as much as Tampa that series.

That was part of it.

The Canadians saw Buffalo doing that and started doing it themselves too.

Listen, the rulebook is applied liberally.

depending on who's officiating the game.

I mean, the games that were officiated by Francis Charon, for whatever reason, were like much more ticky tacky calls.

Like we're going to call everything, you know, it was consistent.

At least there was a lot of penalties.

I wouldn't even consider penalties in the regular season, but they called them, they called everything.

But when you see that, you know, the mandate is pretty much, we're going to call high sticks and that's about it.

then you have to use what's your advantage.

And you cannot allow a team that four checks with all five of its players to get so quickly and easily to your defenseman.

Because if you want to beat Carolina, and I wrote about it and talked about it, the first touch you have on the puck is the most important one.

It's not the last one where you score a goal.

The first one, so that you can get out of your zone, is the most important one against these guys.

And the other thing is once the zone time was established by Carolina, they run a lot of picks in the offensive zone.

And you are either going to have to run into them and go down and draw a penalty that way at one point or another.