A few thoughts in preparation for tonight's game.
(1) Elliotte Friedman's
'30 Thoughts' was absolutely loaded with Ottawa-relevant stuff this week. As always, you should give the entire thing a read -- it's excellent stuff.
I thought notes 'eight' and 'nine' were worth expanding on. I'm going to work in reverse order because I think number eight is really fascinating -- number nine's a bit more cut and dry.
9. Ten months ago, MacLean won the Jack Adams Award as coach of the year and received a three-year extension, which begins next season. Quite likely, he gets another job if he's let go, but, let's say for argument's sake he doesn't. Then, the Senators, who have a tight budget to begin with, are going to pay him to do nothing? Will it hurt their ability to do other hockey business? That makes a lot less sense than sitting down with a guy who's got you into the playoffs two years in a row and saying, "We have some concerns, let's figure out how we're going to fix them." Also better than a sixth coach in eight years.
I've got a few thoughts about this, but I think the most important thing is that the conclusion Friedman reaches -- that it's highly improbable that Paul MacLean will be relieved of his duties at season's end -- is accurate. The reality is that there's enough blame to be scattered elsewhere for this team's woes than just the head coach, he has a track record of success, just inked a multi-year extension, and is probably Bryan Murray's last head coach before his inevitable retirement. And, he's doing all of this on a very tight budget. So, that's pretty much it.
That said, I do think MacLean has to answer some questions about where it all went wrong this year. I think you have to expand on the fact why Patrick Wiercioch, who has looked great for four months now, spend most of the season in the press box. And, with Wiercioch in the press box, why guys like Chris Phillips and Jared Cowen and, to some extent, Eric Gryba were given brutally-long leashes as they continued to sink the team.
There are the ice-time allocation questions, too. What's with the Greening-Smith-Neil obsession? Nothing in the numbers supports them as an effective checking line, no matter what the coaching staff suggests about the trio.
There's other stuff, too. Yesterday, I wrote about Ottawa's
historically low shot-blocking percentages at even-strength, with
this being the money graph. This is more minor stuff, but if you're a head coach of a team that's conceded three or more goals just about every game this season, you kind of have to figure out this stuff, and explain it to the guys who are paying attention.
All this to say, MacLean's very likely safe, but I think he certainly shoulders some of the blame. And, I suspect there's plenty of disenchantment from above -- I've written about this ad infinitum.
(2) Which brings us to the next point, or Friedman's #8.
8. MacLean said last week the Senators gave up 11 chances per game last season, and are up to 18 a night in 2013-14. That's tough on your goalies. The organization is concerned with repeated mistakes and with the lack of progress by Jared Cowen and Patrick Wiercioch. You can see the stress on MacLean, going through his first major adversity as a head coach in an intense market. But, his job being in question makes little sense to me.
(
A quick side-note: Though I agree with the larger point here and Friedman's general assessment in the entire post, I do wish guys would stop lumping Jared Cowen and Patrick Wiercioch together. One guy has been just horrifying all year. The other, save maybe the month of October, looks just fine to me.)
Tyler Dellow jumped all over this scoring chance argument, blasting holes through MacLean's "theory". Again, you should read the entire thing. The long and short of it is, it's basically impossible to come up with the scoring chance numbers MacLean's professing, considering the absurdly-tight correlation with shot-attempts (in proprtion) that has rendered the tracking of these chances basically useless. It's just like manually clocking zone-time -- the shot-attempts do the dirty work for us, and it's been checked over, and over, and over, showing an extremely-close relationship.
So, is MacLean honestly trying to disingenuously sell "eighteen scoring chances!", or does he have perhaps an ulterior motive? Dellow's last paragraph is the money one here, I think. He puts out three theories, but senses the last one is the most accurate:
The third possibility, and the one I’d bet on if I had to guess, is that this is some politicking. If you’re trying to convince management (or ownership) that you need new defencemen, one way to do it is to claim that the scoring chances against have exploded. You just have to hope that management and ownership don’t know enough about the relationship between scoring chances and shot attempts to get suspicious.
I mean, is there any way that this isn't the case? Either Ottawa's retained the most liberal scoring chance counter in the history of the game, or Paul MacLean and his staff are fudging the numbers a bit to shift blame away from the goaltending, and onto the shoulders of the defense.
This highlights a massive chasm between the coaching staff and management, too. Remember Bryan Murray's comments about how Cody Ceci stabilized the defense, the cherry on top of his regular endorsements of a 'big, strong, mobile' defensive corps?
Well, I don't think Paul MacLean agrees -- not anymore, anyway. I wrote this just a few days ago, after MacLean sort of took the defense to task:
But there's just something to be said about how colossal a failure this entire team has been in the defensive zone. We're starting to hear the quotes know from the coaching staff more or less owning that the defense just wasn't good enough and wasn't ready enough to start this year, let alone take a team to the playoffs -- a far cry from Bryan Murray's comments about the 'stability' the kid Cody Ceci brought on call-up.
Another shot over the weekend, via the
Ottawa Sun:
"Our team play, for the most part, has been to blame. We've played too much in our own zone. We've turned over the puck too much as a team and as a result, when you do that, you're on the wrong side of the puck defensively and you take penalties."
If Paul MacLean senses the defense is crap (he's 100% right; the team is loaded with third-pairing defensemen to complement an all-world first-pairing guy), and the team's on a ridiculously-tight budget, it would make sense to sort of blur the scoring chances a bit unfavorably so as to say, "Look, this is a
real problem that needs to be addressed."
The only question is, who is MacLean trying to convince? Management, or ownership? On one hand, you have the guy who offered Jared Cowen eight years. On the other hand, you have the "we have too much talent!" and "you don't need to spend money to win!" guy.
Perhaps both is the answer.
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