Actually, I think the coaches "like" a bit of a losing streak....I've heard it said often that when a team gets on a winning roll they stop listening to the coaches. You can see with the Flames if you look over the past 5-6 games that they've stopped doing some of the things that made them successful. As far as I can tell these were:
- short passes in the D-zone, followed by a long - accurate - pass to a forward in the neutral zone mixed with the occasional long stretch pass; they're not finding space because ....
- close gap support; they've started to drift too far away from each other, making it easy for other teams to get turnovers on passes that are too long or slow
- timing and tape-to-tape passes; they seem to be feeling forced right now and their passes are far less clean than they were - are other teams figuring them out?
- always facing down-ice, rather than up-ice; when they were doing well, they were facing up-ice a lot, picking up passes on the fly, and just moving FAST afterwards; they're looking backward too much right now.
Yes, we've had a few crappy goals scored against us, and a bit of bad reffing etc. - all that stuff evens out pretty much over the year. Just not getting bounces today - but we got lots a few weeks ago.
It was a frustrating game to watch - guys seemed a bit slow and awkward - a bit out of position. Good work for the coaches to hammer at!!
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