Coaches cold on high scoring

globesports.com: Coaches cold on high scoring:


NHL coaches are just so predictable. Or they just don’t get it. Or maybe it’s a combination of both.

How else to explain their reaction to two of the most exciting games played in the league this season — Sunday’s 9-5 game between the St. Louis Blues and Colorado Avalanche, effectively decided on Paul Stastny’s second goal (and fourth point of five points for the night) at the 7:36 mark of the third; and then four nights later, when the Tampa Bay Lightning and the Calgary Flames — in their first meeting in the Sunshine State since the seventh game of the 2004 Stanley Cup final — were in a 5-5 tie after two, only to see the game go Calgary’s way on Jarome Iginla’s third-period hat trick.

The Flames-Lightning game had a little of everything — defensive breakdowns, bang-bang plays, and mostly, scoring chances in open ice, which you rarely ever see in the over-coached NHL anymore.

The goaltending wasn’t great, but it wasn’t as if either of the starters — Calgary’s Miikka Kiprusoff or the Lightning’s Johan Holmqvist — gagged on every slow roller that came their way either. Just about every goal came off a quality scoring chance and demonstrated, once again, that if the likes of Martin St. Louis and Vincent Lecavalier, Iginla or Kristian Huselius, ever get an inch of open ice, they have the capacity to finish off around the net, even facing a standard six-by-four hockey net; and even in an era when the goalie equipment is still too big.
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Predictably, though, this is how the post-game comments went. Instead of saying, ‘geez, wasn’t that fun, wasn’t that great?’ there was Flames’ coach Mike Keenan saying: “There are nights like this, hopefully not too many.”

Keenan went on to say: “Neither coach would be happy with this game in terms of defensive play. If you’re really an offensive-minded coach, you love it. I don’t know if there are any in the league though.”

Another point on this…

Phil Esposito was doing his normal gig on XM, and he was bitching about how rotten the game was. And then he noted how he was playing golf, and people kept coming up to him to tell him how much they enjoyed the game — and Esposito was surprised at the reaction.

There are a couple of things you can take from this.

First, what coaches want is not what fans want. Coaches are paid to win — period. Fans want to be entertained. While hockey can be entertaining, a coach that plays an entertaining style but loses has a name in the industry: color analyst.

Espo, the former GM, makes a good case that the folks “on the inside”, the so-called movers and shakers, see the game differently than the fans do. Some of them have a good handle on the game and what fans like — others see the game from how they view it and enjoy it. And the game to the “hard core” fans is a lot different than it is to the more casual fan.

Just because the “experts” say so doesn’t make it so (oh my god, I’m in Tom Benjamin territory…); after all, that was the driving force behind the current unbalanced schedule taht’s being dumped after this year, and you can see how popular that was. Like any business, it can be tough separating personal preferences from the interests of the customers, and it takes good research and careful analysis to keep those personal biases from creeping in. That’s something, frankly, the league hasn’t always been good at doing.

Now, one shouldn’t take that to the next level and assume that I’m now agreeing with Tom that all of the people in charge are idiots; they aren’t. Just that they’re fallible, and that just because they say something is so doesn’t make it so. That’s why I think the idea of an R&D group and budget in the league is a great idea. Here’s hoping the board of governors buys into it someday soon….

(hat tip: kukla)

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