Quote:
Originally Posted by Psytic
Maybe but he was a motivator and had that team believing they could come back and beat anyone. There is no "Find A Way Flames or Cardiac Kids/ Vets or that type of swagger any more. Under Ward they come out flat like they had a flat of beer the day before the game, show up for a period or maybe two if we are lucky, and skate around like their feet are in mud every second game. The last game it looked like a team that smokes a pack a day versus Olympic Athletes with how slow they were on pucks and getting up the ice. They get bailed out by Markstrom and win games they have no business winning and are less than the sum of their parts when in the past they played way way above their heads and looked like the best conditioned team on the ice. There's things beyond X and Os I really really liked about Sutter and Hartley coached teams that Ward could learn.
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Like I said, his rep here is based on one of his 4 seasons. The Flames never did that in his first 2 seasons, nor his last. Apologists argue it was because of the rebuild, but he started with a veteran team with skill - Iginla, Tanguay, Cammi, Glencross, Stempniak, Hudler, Gio, Backlund, Brodie, were all on that team, and they didn’t do it. The next year he had same guys except Iginla, and he’d added Monahan. He had Cammi in a contract year and he was pretty unmotivated. And they went nowhere, and were simply a bad team.
The 2015 success was down to luck, and a chance connection between Monahan, the new and exciting Gaudreau and Hudler (who had a career year), Wideman also having a career year due to his chemistry with Gaudreau.
I don’t think that year was due to Hartley motivating anyone. It was them self-motivating because they were excited to play with each other.