"fitness level" - ah yes, they were
more fit than the other 29 teams. Totally
Roll your eyes then. If you go back in time this was a flames team that was known as being a country club for veteran players the years before and Hartley was credited as installing a real work ethic for the first time in a while.
I already told you that Hartley had aspects of his coaching that were good. Literally in the post you dismissed as "mental gymnastics". But his entire ####ing strategy was to get outshot and score on the counter. It's not a strategy that wins consistently. It doesn't win consistently in the regular season. It doesn't win consistently in the playoffs. It's just a bad strategy long term. That's why Brad Treliving fired him. Brad Treliving explicitely stated that systems were the reason Hartley was let go, when Hartley was let go. I don't know what you're trying to argue.
The team played over their heads in the regular season, exceeded expectations and had the best playoff success they've had since 04 to date.
Yeah. Hartley was the best coach out of the last
five coaches we have had (a full decade of coaches). And he was
still a coach with mickey mouse systems that don't cut it if you plan on winning it all. The last time we had a genuinely good coach was probably Mike Keenan. And before that Darryl Sutter.
We need a good coach again instead of another dud. A hundred bad coaches are still a hundred bad coaches.
Here were the defense pairs and their ES ice time and their on-ice goals:
Gio-Brodie - 62:13 - 2 GF 1 GA
Hanifin-Hamonic - 77:25 - 1 GF 4 GA
Valimaki-Andersson - 28:12 - 1 GF 0 GA
Fantenberg-Andersson - 19:46 - 1 GF 0 GA
Two of our losses in that series were one goal games. Another, game 5, was tied and we were dominating it when the second pair completely shifted the momentum and got scored on.
Yeah I think sheltering players who were a liability would have squeezed out one out of the three winnable games, maybe even two or all three for all we know. That's not to say it accounts for the other issue (that his systems were figured out by Bednar and he had no counter in terms of an effective breakout plan) but it sure as #### could have prevented us from dropping FOUR STRAIGHT GAMES.
And yeah, I think a player who was obviously feeling it offensively (5 goals in 5 games) might have been able to help the team squeeze out one or two more goals with expanded icetime. Maybe an extra shift or ten in Frolik's spot - Frolik was one of our worst players in the playoffs and has not had a good playoff since 2013. Again, we just needed to get one or two more wins for it to have been a series.