Quote:
Originally Posted by Tron_fdc
Unfortunately, we're stuck with the roster as it is. We fix the team by (somehow) getting more out of the players we have. It's (IMO) too late to bring up "the kids" to bring back whatever chemistry we had 9 games ago. At that point you had guys playing their heart out, because they knew the second our vets were healthy it was musical chairs until they ran out of seats and were sent down. Bring them up now after clearing out a roster spot, and I doubt you see the same urgency.
I get the whole "correlation, causation" argument, but there is NO DOUBT in my mind (never has been) that the slide coincides with the return of Stajan, Raymond and Colbourne. Stats guys can throw whatever stat out they want, but you can't quantify intangibles and chemistry. Teams feed off guys who work their ass off in every facet of the game, which is what those kids were all doing, regardless of what they brought to the scoresheet. Vets come back and suddenly the foot comes off the pedal, urgency is lost, we get sub par goaltending, and here we are. You can see it in their play; the entire team just looks average. The forecheck is gone, the cycle is lost, and our breakout looks like it was designed by Rhett Warrener.
The only way we get better right now is if the vets start playing their bags off, or we hit another injury and a few guys come up from Adirondack. If we had the luxury of rotating Baertschi/Ferland/Granlund/Jooris/Vet thorugh the lineup on any given gameday I bet you would see the urgency return.
Without that, I just don't see the losses stopping any time soon.
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The "intangibles" crowd can throw whatever they want at me too and I'm not going to believe it just because they say so. You can't explain things away with a vague concept and claim certainty. The reality is the vets are playing just as hard as they were when we were winning
with the very same vets in the lineup. We aren't losing now because it was Baertschi in the lineup before vs Colborne now. That's just not true. We won 6 out of 9 games when trailing going into the third period before the vets came back. Now the vets are back and we still keep trailing going into the third, but it's the vets fault we don't come back? I don't think so. No team in history comes even close to keeping that up