Nov 13 practice

[Robbob]

Originally Posted by polak

Over reacting how?

How would you like people to react to being one of, if not the worst performing teams in the league?

Just a game. Move on to the next one. It has been extremely negative around here. Even when something good happens, something negative follows. Ie. They scored to take the lead but they will still screw this up.

[cofias]

The thing with Ferland is that he doesn't need to hit people in order to be an effective player. In fact, I would argue that he is much more useful to the Flames when he is instead using his skating, vision, puck skills and positioning to drive play for his line, which is what he has been doing this whole season so far. It's even resulted in point production as well, so I'm honestly dumbfounded by some of the terrible posts in this thread. We need more Ferland on this team, not less.

[Brick]

The Flames should be more focused on team speed. That has dropped off considerably.
Whatever it takes, trades, etc., but team speed needs to improve if they hope to improve.

[Robbob]

My worry is the concussions are mounting up for a kid his age (Ferland). He took a good shot in the Dallas game which forced him to leave the game. I was actually surprised to see him back against the NYR to be quite honest.

[Textcritic]

Originally Posted by polak

Over reacting how?

How would you like people to react to being one of, if not the worst performing teams in the league?

With some longer-term perspective.

The team looks terrible at the moment, the optics on the bench appear bad, the Flames's best players have been alarmingly underwhelming, and the results provide ample correlation to what many have instinctively, anecdotally identified as "the problem(s)." It is especially frustrating because a number of us believed that this team should be a playoff team this year.

With all that in mind, I tend to think along the following lines: first, reactive responses are usually not good ones. A trade at this point or a change behind the bench of a new coaching staff are reactive, and most likely will not help to correct whatever the problem is. Second, it is simply not practical to expect a reactive response at this point because Flames management has demonstrated a strong appetite for calculated analysis. This is going to take more time than 16 games—even just to assess where the problems are and how to fix them, and I don't see the point in becoming especially animated about what we perceive should be done.

It is disappointing and frustrating at the moment, but I still think the team can come out of this, play well and be better for it in the long run.