Ray Ferraro sees nothing wrong with the Zegras/Milano goal, challenges Tortorella's comments

Much has been made of former NHL coach and current NHL on ESPN analyst John Tortorella's comments on the Trevor Zegras/Sonny Milano Michigan ally-oop goal over the past week.

While Tortorella isn't a fan of the play himself, as he feels that the play went against the tradition of the game, Ray Ferraro has taken an opposing stance, declaring that he is a fan of the play and the skill involved.

Shortly after Tortorella made his feelings about the Zegras/Milano play known, Ferraro joined the panel to discuss why he felt that the play was important for the growth of the game.

"I don't care how the puck ends up in the net," Ferraro began. "The whole point of the game is to get more than the other guys."

The idea that there is a right or a wrong way to score goals is absurd. Ferraro made an excellent point that as long as you're scoring goals, who cares how you're getting them? Ferraro also alluded to the level of skill that players today have that guys during his era simply didn't have.

"These kids can do things that we couldn't do - like how about a guy going in and shooting the puck between his legs?

"When we played, first of all, you wouldn't have done that because there would have been some big guy roaming around that wouldn't have been very happy with you. The other thing is, we weren't good enough to do it, so I think we're in an age where we're going to see things that we're not used to seeing, because these kids are better at it than we were," Ferraro continued.

The one concession that Ferraro made to Tortorella's point is that there is some level of risk in the play, because if Zegras flipped the puck over the net and Milano had missed it, the Ducks would have been facing an odd-man rush the other way. If the Sabres convert on that chance and score, the coach probably isn't very happy with Zegras on that play. But Ferraro also conceded that since it's so hard to score in this day and age, you do need to add an element of creativity and try things that haven't been done before to try to surprise the opposing team to get that creative advantage.

"We're getting opened up to a skill level that we've never seen before," said Ferraro, "and I think a lot of us guys that played back then have to get used to the way these guys play, because this is the way these guys playing today do it."

I think the hardest thing for Tortorella to deal with is the fact that today's game isn't the same one from the 90's and early 2000's. The game has evolved and has become much more reliant on skill than it has on size and strength. It's well within Tortorella's rights as a person to prefer the older style of hockey, but at the end of the day, that's not the style that is played anymore, so Torts may have to make peace with that - especially if he hopes to get back to coaching an NHL team.

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