Rejoint: mars 2019
Messages: 2,744
Mentions "j'aime": 2,601
Thanks for tagging me on this topic.
I think Keefe is doing things only slightly better than Babcock was during his time with the team. Babcock's lack of in-game adjustments was very evident and even frustrating and so the comparison here in that area is kind of the same for me.
When you have home ice advantage and can't find ways to get Matthews or Marner (not necessarily together) away from some of the matchups Tampa, Montreal and Columbus wanted, as a coach that's on you.
Now, about Marner specifically: I had a conversation with a friend on Marner and he pointed out that even though the effort is there 100% of the time, the results are not necessarily great. What did he mean by that? He gave a few examples and I'll share one here. He said that on the powerplay, Marner just is not as effective as he would be if this roster had a threatening shot from the point. He went onto say that makes Marner less effective because teams just focus on locking down passes to Matthews and suddenly Marner loses the leverage of being dangerous on the powerplay. I thought alot about this point in particular and the more I think about it, the more glaring it seems.
Now what I'd like players to think about for the rest of the off-season: is scoring 60 goals important? Is racking up 100+ points important? Is winning games 7-6 important vs winning games 3-1? Is winning playoff rounds important? At what point do you put team success ahead of personal success? This is directly questions for Matthews and Marner because they wanted to play with each other through this past season. Perhaps that hurt the team overall, perhaps it didn't. Something to think about.