Quote:
Originally Posted by Itse
Defense is the area of play most affected by coaching.
Under Hartley our D was at one point highly appreciated, to the point where acquiring Hamilton was called "almost not fair" by a rival GM. I think it's safe to say in retrospect it wasn't about the high quality of players really. Hartley was a competent coach. Not the greatest coach ever, but experienced and competent.
Gulutzan was flat out incompetent in creating a working defensive structure, and, Peters so far has looked almost as bad. The only difference seems to be that Peters can at least do the bare minimum basic head coach stuff like shuffle lines when needed, change things when they don't work, and call a time out.
When a coach always seems to have terrible goalies, it might not actually be simply about the goalies.
Carolina still has two bad goalies. McElhinney and Mrazek are both way under .900, but they manage to keep the GAAs at a decent level because their team defense isn't a poop show.
We suck defensively, and it's not because of lack of player material. We have the players for success.
But at this level, coaching makes a massive difference. Now, I'm not quite ready to give up on Peters because this is a very young season. Maybe he gets this thing together. I really hope he does.
But I can't help but wonder why are we rolling the dice on an unproven coach, when Darryl Sutter was available. His WORST stretch as a head coach was when he made the playoffs with the Sharks 4/4 times and won a round twice....makint that one "weak" stretch better than everything the Flames have done without Darryl since 1990.
|
I think Darryl instills in players what it takes to win, he also knows how to get them playing at a very high compete level. Now lets say we had Darryl for 2 or 3 years and then hired a coach like Peters, the players would now be of a different culture. The compete level in Sutter's teams at times was rarely unmatched. They came to play, came to play hard and with a winning attitude. I like a lot of things Peters does but still maintain we would have been better to hire a coach with success and winning pedigree. There is no substitute for experience especially when your teaching a group of talented young guys to get it right.
With our core getting older we took a bit of a gamble with Peters I support him and hope he can get this team rolling. I agree this team can be better defensively and can win the current goaltenders. When Hartley's goaltenders struggled he compensated by having guys blocking shots. For the most part I liked the teams compete under Hartley. We have the talent, but we need to find a way to get the team to continue to play better defensively.