you wanna see “possession” hockey?...watch videos of the Soviet Red Army teams...or the 1980’s Edmonton Oilers. Again...these teams are scoring at the rate that teams did in the 1940’s..when they only played 70 games. The fact that the league keeps trying bizarre rule changes to “open” up ice tells u somethings not right. Imagine the Oilers playing with no center red line and 2 line passes. The goalie equipment is ridiculous...this might sound crazy..but the game is too fast now...ive never seen so many 2 and 3 on 1’s butchered because these guys are skating out of control. Theres no way an expansion team should be in the finals..but the teams all play alike...Wayne Gretzky said that this stuff is being taught at the bantam and midget league level...the games to robotic now. You gave me a few plays of “skill”..but it all comes down to who gets the lucky bounces. During the season...out of 7 or 8 league games on any night, 5 or 6 ..the score will be 2-1..or 3-2. Ive watched game from the 80’s and 90’s,,,and i cant believe its the same game. You gotta let your stars be stars. Every niow and then ill see a good game...but its mostly just a boring, scrambled mess.
The Soviet Red Army is a good example of "possession" hockey, but the Edmonton Oilers of the 1980s really aren't. Don't just watch highlights of those Edmonton teams. I recently watched a few entire games from their Stanley Cup years, including the clinching games against Philadelphia in 1987 and Boston in 1988. Yes, those teams had skilled players (I think Jari Kurri was one of the most underrated players of all time) ... but I was surprised to see how sloppy and chaotic those games were for long stretches.
I think time blurs our memories. Legendary Montreal goalie Ken Dryden said something like that a few years ago. He described watching some video clips from the peak of his career in the 1970s, and he was embarrassed at how slow the game looked compared to the modern NHL.
I agree 100% about the goalies, though. It's not just the equipment that's the problem here. What you're seeing is the second or third generation of NHL goalies who were actually trained as goalies since they were young kids. They've almost perfected the position in terms of how it's played. Up until the late 1980s, almost every NHL goalie was a guy who played another position as a kid but then started playing in goal because they weren't very good forwards or defensemen. Go back to some of those video highlights of the 1980s, and you'll notice that the goaltending was -- with the notable exceptions of Patrick Roy and Grant Fuhr -- uniformly awful by modern standards. They didn't play their angles well, gave up huge rebounds, didn't react quickly on cross-ice passes, etc.