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Originally Posted by Dr. Pepper
The most troubling aspect for me after watching this game is the group took a step backwards in becoming a puck-possession team.
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I don't think I could agree less.
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- They still seem to chip the puck off the glass into the neutral zone as an easy way out of the defensive zone - but the majority of the time that chip is going straight to the other team.
- I see no creativity getting the puck from defense to offense - no skating it out of the corners, no crisp passing. Puck being hurled at skates, or coming to a forward waist high seems to be the majority of what's going on
- Speed just isn't there. We are not scary at all. No speed in neutral zone, no speed in offensive zone. Just too slow.
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The Wild plays a suffocating game. It had an effect on how our team looked. However, when there was room the plays were the same. The results were not the same because we had worse players playing. Street and Jones are not Backlund and Cammalleri.
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- Defensive coverage makes it look like we are on a continuous PK. The other team is throwing the puck to each other on the cycle with impunity. We always seem surprised at where the puck is going. When we do come up with it, if we ring it around the other team is there, not a team-mate.
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This has little to do with dump&chase and just a result of having a lot of players that are just not very good at playing defense.
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- Offensively, the same lack of overall sense of where your team-mates are leads to easy turnovers.
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Did you check the lines? All the lines had been mixed up. There are some downsides to that.
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- It just seems we are regressing back to dump/chase because we have no confidence in either the individual carrying, or where we are going to find team-mates.
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While I agree with the lack of finding team-mates, I saw little dumping and chasing. Mostly we lost pucks due to a ton of bad/blind passes.