Quote:
Originally Posted by timbit
Such a good league with such parity. So difficult for fans to have a realistic approach or opinion on where their team and coaching staff fits. Long season and little separation in the 4 to 12 teams in each conference.
Secondly, it kinda makes me laugh when one reads and hears the coaching critiques when things go awry through the first thirty, forty or fifty(?) games in the season. How would you know? Fact is how would one know what is happening regarding moves that are instructional, motivational and strategical?
The game outcomes?
Lots of good and bad things can happen over a season.
Can guarantee that not all the good and bad things are correlated to coaching.
When your teams’ best players are better than the other teams best players you win .
Yes, coaching is important.
Not sure anyone on this board can accurately critique and or give the coaching staff their due credit and/ or blame up to this point.
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Posts like this really frustrate me.
Yes, there is a great deal of parity in the league, and the margin between winning and losing is razor thin. Yes, there are a LOT of moving parts to a professional hockey team. Yes, it's a long season with a great deal of ebb and flow. Yes, not all that is good or bad is attributable to the coach. And yes, it is very difficult to accurately assess how much of the success or struggles of a team are the result of the coach.
But it's not impossible.
There are a lot of fans with very little knowledge of how coaching impacts a professional team. But that doesn't mean that there are no fans with informed and valid opinions. Speaking in absolutes, and dismissing all opinions because it's a difficult thing to assess, is just as ridiculous as some of the outlandish views that get posted.
Despite all of the variables, and the fact that much of what takes place happens inside the room and thus unavailable to fans, there is one simple way to gain a starting point on the situation:
Does the team play to its abilities, above its abilities, or below? Even this question is difficult to assess, but not impossible. And from that, we can begin to evaluate the impact that the coaching staff is having, and the results that they are getting.
There are plenty of valid opinions on this site, on both sides of the argument.
And there are lots of very knowledgeable fans here with pretty informed opinions.
At the end of the day, all of the discussions are just that - opinions - but simply dismissing all views because you don't like the conclusion they draw, seems like a pretty weak view to me.