Monday, November 27, 2006
that OTHER defenseman hated in Alberta
I hope Trent Yawney gets another crack at an HC job in the NHL. While I despised the guy as a Flames player (think 05/06 Cory Cross, except playing 20+ minutes a game), I wrote last year (after his team ended an 8-game Flames winning streak) that it looked like he might make a decent coach. I still think that; he's smart, and I assume he'll learn from Opportunity #1.
Obviously the injuries hurt this year too, though that's been a bit overblown in the post-mortems. Martin Havlat was not going to score 160 points this year: even if he had stayed healthy, he would have gone through a long slump where he looked awful, on account of he's Martin Havlat. Khabibulin has a Cup but has never been a elite (i.e. Top 10) NHL goalie, and often he's been much worse.
Nevertheless: despite all the above plus the fact that surely he was better at his job than Dale Tallon was at his, I still don't know that I could say he deserved to keep his job. Not to put too fine a point on it, but: at every other level of hockey, if your team constantly gets killed because they take more penalties than the other team, that's on the coach. I don't see why that shouldn't be mostly the same in the NHL.
Tyler has noted this a couple of times too; my comment last season after Chicago earned 4 points in Alberta was this:
Yeah.
Obviously the injuries hurt this year too, though that's been a bit overblown in the post-mortems. Martin Havlat was not going to score 160 points this year: even if he had stayed healthy, he would have gone through a long slump where he looked awful, on account of he's Martin Havlat. Khabibulin has a Cup but has never been a elite (i.e. Top 10) NHL goalie, and often he's been much worse.
Nevertheless: despite all the above plus the fact that surely he was better at his job than Dale Tallon was at his, I still don't know that I could say he deserved to keep his job. Not to put too fine a point on it, but: at every other level of hockey, if your team constantly gets killed because they take more penalties than the other team, that's on the coach. I don't see why that shouldn't be mostly the same in the NHL.
Tyler has noted this a couple of times too; my comment last season after Chicago earned 4 points in Alberta was this:
...if they expect to be a playoff team, they have to stop cheating so damn much.
Yeah.
# posted by Matt @ 10:54 pm 
