Quote:
Originally Posted by GullFoss
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. |
It's just as easy to argue that if we kept playing Johnson in December we would lost all the games due to soft glove side goals.