Quote:
Originally Posted by Ryan Coke
When you have a whole team of players collectively bombing far too often, a team that a few years ago were very hard working, resilient, and consistently competitive. And your best solution is to turn over the entire roster as opposed to changing the leadership?
Even if you cling to that idea of a complete player overhaul, it’s completely unrealistic. And when you have 15 of 18 skaters coming out flat so often, at some point you have to look for the structural reasons why that is happening, not just trade the 15 players that consistently come out unready to compete at the required levels.
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First, the players aren't all bombing. Some players are performing very well and that can't be ignored even though it doesn't fit the overall storyline or that it hasn't produced the results in the standings.
Second, while it may be naive to say you can overhaul the roster, it is equally naive to think you can fix this stuff if motivation or commitment is a core problem with the roster itself.
Overall I actually see things as follows
- This roster isn't as good as people thought it was, primarily due to a lack of natural goal scoring, and a terrible RW group
- Thus expectations were too high
- The team has still under-performed due to a combination of lack of goal scoring (particularly timely goal scoring), special teams, an injury to their MVP at the worst time, and yes - some bad luck.
- The inability for them to win games they should have (and by that I mean win games where they outplayed the opponents) has made it more difficult to maintain buy-in