First, acquire and draft small, quick players, and develop the ones you have in the system. Including defensemen. There will still be an institutional bias in favor of big, rugged players for years. A team that swaps out its large, overvalued players and devotes its resources smaller, undervalued players will have success. The Sabres are demonstrating this so far.

In fact, since this is a long horizon type thing, a team that already has smaller, quicker players has a leg up. The Sabres appear to me to be a team like that.

Second, coaches need to better take advantage of the elimination of the two line pass rule. Deploying a player out toward the attacking blue line while you're defending your zone has more benefits than a possible breakaway pass. It elongates the battle for position and possession.

The problem is that you're going to be defending your zone undermanned more often. But power plays and penalty kills are up drastically already, and teams are going to get better at defending shorthanded situations be virtue of practice. Also, you won't necessarily be shorthanded, depending on how legitimate a threat the cherry picker is. Someone will have to cover him.

Question assumptions. Why did it make sense for five-man units confine themselves to their own zone when the other team was attacking and had possession in their zone? Because a "cherry picker" out at the red line is simply ineffective. There's not enough territory between a cherry picker at the red line and a defenseman on the point for him to be a legitimate breakaway threat, especially if the outlet pass comes from the area deeper than the faceoff dots (giving defensemen time to react and change direction). On the other hand, the danger of an outlet pass from goal line to opposite blue line and the fact defensemen staying inside the blue line won't be able to reach the cherry picker makes this a legitimate strategy.

You'll find new zone defenses being invented to cover cherry pickers, which eventually will be successful, but: until then you'll be expoliting an imbalance and deriving an advantage from it, and also, even when it's successfully defended, it expands the area the other team is defending, which is to your advantage, if you've gotten smaller and quicker. When you're smaller and quicker, open ice favors you.

Third, the coach of this organization needs to devote significant time and resources to teaching open ice hitting. (I know, I know, they didn't used to have to teach it.) Any schmoe can check a puck carrier, or, more often, a recent puck carrier, into the boards; as proof I offer that any schmoe always did, sometimes with embarrassing results. If referees continue to call "late hits," your smaller, more stretched out team can actually develop a physical advantage if it learns to punish puck carriers in open ice.

The ferocity of an open ice hit has nothing whatsoever to do with the size of the check-er, it has to do with positioning, timing and -- say it with me -- speed. A Mike Peca traveling 10 MPH -- which isn't near top speed -- can hit a puck carrier traveling 5 MPH with a force greater than Scott Stevens ever managed on someone stationary along the boards.

Unlike the former necessity of having large forwards to take cross checks in front of the net and large defensemen to clear them out, in the New NHL™ you simply don't have to be big to do anything. Including playing "physical."

Some reliance on referees to continue to call things the way they have this month is assumed, but not much. More penalties = more times shorthanded = more practice defending your zone with two defensemen and two forwards while forward #3 is out cherry picking, and you most certainly do have to be big if they stop calling penalties in front of the net. But mostly, these are opportunities inherent in the new rules and structure that will be there for years. Let's see how the first team to figure these things out does.