If you’ve followed hockey long enough, you know this always happens during the playoffs. Here comes your team, passing, skating, and playing fun-to-watch hockey. You’re generating chances and scoring goals. You’ve won a series or two.

But you must’ve done something to displease the hockey gods, because your next opponent is an absolute tactical nightmare. For them, Objective No. 1 is to make you mess up, and Objective No. 1(a) is to embarrass you in the process. They choke off play in the neutral zone so tightly that you feel like you’re playing in a bathtub.

Take notice, Harvard hockey fans. The Brown Bears are on the schedule. Quick, everybody grab your dry-erase markers and white boards. It’s time to talk neutral-zone trap.

What is the neutral-zone trap, anyway? Here’s the short version: a system whereby a team sends in one forechecker, in attempt to steer the play to one side or the other, then clogs the neutral zone with the other four.

That effectively shuts off the middle, leaving only the walls for you to work with. And once your team gets the puck near the red line—even if it’s on a helpless chip along the boards—they’re on you with a double-team, squeezing you like an orange until the puck pops out.

This is not pretty, but it is championship-winning hockey. Ask the New Jersey Devils.

“Probably the hardest system to play against, anywhere,” confirmed Nate Leaman, the former Harvard assistant who is now Union’s head coach. “Guys in the NHL are trapping, and teams just can’t get through the trap.”

The object of the trap is to take one of two things away from you: the puck or your speed.

“Usually, if you have one, you don’t have the other,” Leaman said. “If you make it through the neutral zone with the puck, you don’t usually have much speed. Or, you’re dumping the puck and chasing it.

“You end up getting through with a lot of 1-on-2’s. Or, you’re getting through and you’re going slow and not a threat. It’s a frustrating system to play against.”

Especially for Harvard. Vermont coach Kevin Sneddon ’92 said the key to success against the Crimson in any game is breaking up plays in the neutral zone and forcing it to dump the puck—two trademarks of the neutral zone trap, and two things Brown did well in its 6-0 win over the Catamounts in the regular-season finale.

“Our forwards never attacked the zone with speed or odd numbers [like a 3-on-2 or 2-on-1],” Sneddon said.

So, how do you attack it offensively? “Keep it as simple as possible,” Leaman said. “I’ve found that when I get into trouble with teams that trap, guys are trying to do too much. You have to just keep it simple, keep the puck moving forward.”

Brown uses the trap as the starting point for its quick transition game, its primary mode of generating offense. However, the Bears counterattack slowed late in the season, as they scored only four goals in a 0-4-1 stretch—including three shutouts—before the UVM win.

“It was simple enough: shoot and get traffic in front of the net for screens and rebounds,” Sneddon said of Brown’s effort that night. “They had an incredible amount of energy in the offensive zone. They were first to all the loose pucks.”