Wednesday, September 30, 2009

Torts: Aggressive System Not Instinctive Yet

Rick Carpiniello at the Rangers Report asked John Tortorella if his aggressive system of play has to become instinctive with the Rangers players yet...

“No, no, it’s going to take some time,” Tortorella said. “We’re working on it every day, our neutral-zone forechecking, our deep forechecking, and all the different things as far as rush coverage. It takes time, and there’ll be some mistakes as we go through, as we start the season, but that’s when you keep on teaching. That’s when I think it becomes instinctive, when you’re constantly teaching after each game.

“I think as you get into late November, early December, I think your team concept is something that should be instinctive because we’re heavily laden in tape, the season is kind of spread out at the beginning of the year more than it is in the middle and the latter stages. So we’re going to keep working at it, and then we’ll back off the tape. When we feel it becomes more instinctive we get away from the tape a little bit and allow them to play and let it happen from there. We don’t want to map it out. You don’t want to over-coach it because it’s such an instinctive game.”

Ryan Callahan also chimes in...

“It was hard last year, him coming in, and we had two practices and we had to jump into a game,” Callahan said. “It’s hard to teach a new system that quickly. It’s nice to have this whole training camp with him. I feel the guys are starting to get it. You can see it in practice and some of the preseason games, that it’s starting to become second nature and you don’t have to think about that.”

...in my opinion this aggressive system will help the Rangers mask some of their deficiencies by being able to out work their opponents. Something we Ranger fans haven't seen a lot of.

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