Tort Reform

From the mouth of a hothead, John Tortorella:

“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.”