Quote:
Originally Posted by dammage79
Summed up my feelings on the subject.
It is funny. The greatest success the flames have had in recent years was in a "unsustainable" system. But it doesn't fit with the advanced stats community to accept that success in this sport is not driven by numbers. It's driven by will and heart. You can have the perfect system but if your players play like robots like they did in gullys system, they won't go far.
I get it. So many people watch the sport, and everyone needs a way to stay interacted with it by many means. If advanced stats keeps people around, so be it. I don't need them to watch the game or tell what's working and what is not. Because most time my perception is that if your team is winning the Corsi game, they're losing where it matters most.
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Thing is will and heart are fickle, unreliable, unpredictable things. We had our "unsustainable" year that we all loved, brought back the same coach but with a better roster, and completely collapsed. You can't just cross your fingers and hope to catch lightning in a bottle every year. Or if you can, there's 31 NHL coaches that would love to hear your secret.
It's also not an either-or choice. Coaches don't just automatically fall in one bucket or the other; they're mostly independent attributes. Gulutzan was a terrible motivator and leader, but he did coach a solid system. His failure doesn't mean solid systems have to go too. And it's short-sighted to throw out everything he touched because it didn't add up to a great team. That's the hope with Peters: he's got the same tactical strengths as Gulutzan while being a better leader behind the bench.