listening to TSN radio on the way home from work today, and jamie maclennan really didn't sound all that positive about Elliot. Something about how he's never been a #1 goalie and that some random goalies have put together unreal years/stats with Hitchcock as coach, mentioning Leclaire (10 shutout year or something), Mason (calder trophy) as just some other obvious goalies who just did better behind a Hitchcock coached team.
I googled to see how much truth there is to this and found a frigin article/blog about it:
http://nhlnumbers.com/2012/7/17/goal...-ken-hitchcock
They summarized the point using both Elliott and Anderson in TO as examples of goalies who are trying to prove they are #1 goalies, but have shown well only on teams with far better defensive prowess. Something to be said about the hard-ass coaches in the league (hitchcock, sutter, babcock, guy in carolina) who preach defensive and actually hold folks accountable to it.
I don't know anything about this new coach, and being a younger guy, i do my best to not consider him another Eakins wonderkid. But if he can't enforce a defensive system then he won't fare any better than the guy before him.
The flames feel a bit like ottawa of the west. Decent forwards, with few top end skill guys, a mobile offensive d, but absolutely no understanding of how to defend. If the flames don't drastically improve defensively, how the heck do we get a guy like Playfair back here?
I have absolutely zero doubt that the flames are fighting for the division lead by the end of the year if we had Daryl Sutter coaching this roster
.