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Originally Posted by 868904
That’s a weak excuse for the players. With the exception of Smith, the Flames best players were arguably the playoff rookies in Anderson, Valimaki, Mangiapane. Bennett was great too but that’s no surprise.
It’s pretty rare for your star / core players to get worse each playoff. Usually it’s the other way around. I feel like Johnny and Mony were better in their first series against Vancouver and have gotten worse each series.
As for the coaches. I don’t understand how a coaching staff that has made all the right adjustments all season long would fail to identify the issues in this series. I think it’s more a confidence thing from the players. Mackinnion did a number on them and spooked them. In Top Gun terms, the whole team “Cougared”. The defenseman will be having nightmares of Mackinnion coming down on them for the whole Summer.
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An excuse maybe, but also potentially some fact to it as well, and only time will tell if true.
All of our key players who played for us in 2015 were better for us in those series (including the Ducks loss). Doesn’t mean they didn’t learn from it or necissarily that they took a step back. And tgat also doesn’t mean there wasn’t experience needed or gained this time around. In 2015, our key players had 0 expectation and presssure on them. We weren’t expected to be there and weren’t expected to win. Literally as the expression goes they were playing with house money.
This time around, they got their first taste of you are expected to lead a team to playoff victory and beyond. They folded like a cheap deck of cards this year. But to suggest that this experience was the same as the last two playoff experiences is simply the untrue. Now there is no guarantee this experience was necissarily for them or that it means it won’t happen again, but there are a lot of examples of players and teams who eventually found their way after taking similar lumps as we just did, but we only time will tell on that.