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Originally Posted by GioforPM
The team got swept last year, but played better against the Ducks than two years before, IMO.
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They also had Giordano/Hamilton/Stone/Tkachuk/Frolik instead of Russell/Wideman/Engelland/Hudler/Colborne while the Ducks had Theodore/Carlyle instead of Fowler/Boudreau. I really don't buy Hartley getting swept considering many of the game-deciding in-game coaching blunders made.
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If they'd made the POs they would have been playing better than the last month which, IMO is skewing some people's memories of the whole year.
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My memory of the whole year starts with Game 1 when Matt Bartkowski started instead of the clearly-better Brett Kulak and played for the next seven games. Which just happened to coincide with Bennett being attached to the hip to guys like Brouwer (despite last year's debacle), Lazar (despite Lazar's total inability to play offence), and Versteeg (despite Versteeg's flat-out poor play) and that disaster of a Bart-Stone pairing.
My memory of the whole year continues onto Jagr's arrival where he was finally placed with Bennett and that line seemed to be developing some chemistry and generating actual dangerous offense only to be taken off to give a jolt to the top line, who were producing anyways.
My memory continues onto how the Flames lost their realistic chance at the playoffs when they went 5-6-2 in December despite Bennett actually producing - 4G 6A from the third line. When you have a third liner playig at that level usually you go on a hot streak, not a cold streak.
My memory of the whole year includes TJ Brodie being attached to Travis Hamonic despite the pairing having cascading offensive weakness caused by Brodie's preference for passing and Hamonic's inability to do anything from the point (Unlike Stone, Hamilton, Giordano, Russell - all partners Brodie has actually succeeded with).
My memory of the whole year includes Jankowski and Bennett being forced to play with Garnet Hathaway, a player with whom they did not fit outside of an obviously flukey start, and no adjustments being made.
My memory of the whole year includes 3M struggles for most of the year, without a single attempt to see if maybe that line had run its course and perhaps some shuffling could help the team.
My memory of the whole year includes a failure to, at any point, put Gaudreau on the side of the power play that would enable quick decision making.
To me Guluzan's failures were clear as early as November 2016 and the next sixteen months were playing out the string as he didn't change anything. The Ducks shut us down in the playoffs and his solution was to stick with it, even though we have an absolutely potent core of defensemen who have all proven they have more offense to give than that which they could in this system, which favoured the one defenseman on the team with a cookie cutter shots-on-goal-don't-think skillset. Giordano was a 55-60 point beast before Gulutzan, Brodie was a 42-50 point beast before Gulutzan, Hamonic was a 25 point option, and each of these guys were an afterthought in a system designed to maximize the Garnet Hathaway dump n cycle game.
It's true, maybe this team could have made the playoffs under Gulutzan. But that would have been despite him, as they have a mostly strong roster.
I sure hope whomever we hire next is in the business of getting the most out of this roster. Gulutxan was not.