Disagree. It’s not too difficult to watch a hockey game and comment on effort. Ultimately the problem is that when you rely on quantitative measurements for everything like stats, advanced stats, etc., they cannot speak to overall effort which is qualitative and very eye testy. That’s why it’s to each individual to determine whether or not they think any given effort is satisfactory. Also why it’s completely fine if Bingo thinks the effort is satisfactory and I don’t, we just have different opinions on it.
In regard to the Flames, these are professional athletes. The effort for example that Kadri put forth in the first 10 -15 games is not equivalent to the effort he put forth since then. I think there’s the human element of discovering what your team is and how good they are and then knowing in your heart and mind what they’re capable of- especially him because he just won a championship and knows what it takes. Yet, that doesn’t excuse the often lacklustre focus, perimeter shots, frequent floating around and refusal to play with that edge he started the season with.
You can go through every player and critique effort to some degree at any time. At no time will effort always be 100%, 100% of the time because that’s humanly impossible. But on the whole and in the big picture you can think back over the season and find many games where the effort was actually poor to average. In fact, in almost all the games they played bottom tier opponents they tended to drop their level of play to such opponents. I qualify that is an effort issue.
You don’t set NHL records for outshooting opponents and futility in scoring when effort is not an issue. Sorry, but scoring requires generally going to hard areas, crashing the net and getting the puck to the middle of the ice.
You know what’s actually “lazy analysis”, saying “well it’s just bad luck”.
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