Quote:
Originally Posted by Textcritic
That is not really what happened:
On the heels of Johnson's six-game streak in Dec, he started the next two, lost them both and recorded a 0.840 SP. Elliott started and won the next game against Arizona, and Johnson started again on 20 Dec against SJ, and lost with a SP of 0.880.
From the start of Jan he started 12 more games and won only 5. He registered a 3.07 GAA and a 0.891 SP over that time.
That is not good enough.
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This doesn't really tell the whole story - and I too think Johnson got a bit of a raw deal through December
- So, Johnson wins 6 in a row to December 10. Then he gets to face TBL and CLB - two very tough teams, with CLB perhaps on their crazy win steak. He loses both. So now he's 6-2 in his last 8 games.
- Instead of letting Johnson play game 9, the flames get Elliott to play a joke of a team in ARZ; he obviously wins that game.
- Then Johnson gets a tough match up in SJS: he loses
- Then in the next 3 of 4 games Elliott gets Vancouver, Colorado and Arizona - perhaps the three worst teams in the league. Johnson? He gets to play SJS again.
Its actually so blatently obvious that Elliott was getting all of the joke teams because the coaches and management really wanted him to get going. In a way he was really babied.
But yet, even after those strings of games to end out December, Johnson goes cold while Elliott continues to suck when he plays teams of any significance. So January was a rough month until the Via Rail incident occurs and the team turns around.
Outside of February and March - where Elliott played well, but the team played even better - Elliott was hot garbage the entire season. Much of that is masked by the weak strength of his schedule. Arguably, if Johnson was truly given the reigns in December, the Flames would have still made the playoffs and actually won a few games when they got there.