the trap

You didn't think it was going to be that easy, did you? Michigan Hockey was blasted back to reality by the NCAA hockey equivalent of the La Brea Tar Pits (a name I couldn't quite come up with on this week's HockeyCast (and high school quiz bowl me hates me for forgetting it)), losing games 3-2 and 2-1 to Notre Dame at Yost, their second straight sweep at the hands of the Irish at home. Notre Dame rolled in without tanks or other high profile weapons but had an even more feared asset: a well-coached hockey team running one of the most grotesque hockey systems out there, the neutral zone trap. And just as the 1990s version of the neutral zone trap claimed the lives of some of the most feared and offensively skilled teams of that era's NHL ('95 Red Wings, '96 Penguins), Michigan's hyper-skilled offensive juggernaut got stuck in the tar pits, unable to gain any traction. The season is far from over, but the road to a potential national championship will also be far from easy.

The Revenge of The Trap

There's always someone waiting for you at the blue line in The Trap [James Coller]

I follow a number of professional hockey scouts on Twitter, the kinds of people who watch the B1G periodically but aren't college hockey-specific enough to know the ins and outs of each conference. Those kinds of people are now watching every Michigan Hockey game this year because of the presence of Owen Power, Kent Johnson, and Matty Beniers on this team. My timeline was filled with these kinds of tweets over the weekend:

Notre Dame is playing a style that would make Jacques Lemaire proud. We really, really hate to see it.

— J.D. Burke (@JDylanBurke) November 29, 2020

For those unfamiliar, Jacques Lemaire was the coach of the New Jersey Devils who is credited with taking the neutral zone trap mainstream, the system that Notre Dame runs. Observers of the B1G like myself have known about the visually disgusting, yet annoyingly effective, style of hockey that the Fighting Irish play for years, but it was quite a shock for pro scouts to see it in action, including one who sits behind our own David Nasternak at Yost this season. Plenty of NCAA teams still run the neutral zone trap even as the NHL has trended away from its rigid adherence in the 90s/00s. Hell, Michigan ran a variety of it last year. But what startled scouts this weekend isn't that the Irish run The Trap, but how well they execute it, and that's credit to their coach, Jeff Jackson. Any team can run The Trap, but few can run it as well as Notre Dame does at the college hockey level.

[AFTER THE JUMP: I promise it gets more fun by the end]