It's Cooper. Can Coop. He's legitimately ruining this teams ENG production by not leaving Kucherov out there the whole time. He put Point, Paul and Guentzel out there? Please. Any ball busting coach would leave Kucherov out there. Cooper also yelled from the bench "no Jake!" To sabotage his decision making. He wins another game because the Blues were too cowardice to play tough. It's sickening.
This, but unironically. Kuch shouldn't be on the bench when the net is empty.
Run any system you want as long as you have the players who can execute. I just want it to work. St. Louis is horrible offensively so it's not a problem on a night like last night. But doing this for 2 periods against the Leafs (who basically showed the whole world how to crack us open) and watching it inevitably fail over and over again and we lose doesn't make it okay because it worked 5 years ago.
Right. We won cups by taking the most talented offensive team in the league and teaching them to play shut down hockey. The gamble is that we will capitalize in our chances more than the other team. Possession was all the rage until around that time, because some ahead-of-the-curve coaches were weaponizing their opponents' prioritizing possession over all else.
It was the right thing to do. But my beef is that the system Cooper runs lives and dies on every possible break going our way. Every team in the league knows what we are going to do before we even do it. A lot of our success was due to it being new and teams not having a playbook. These days a bad offense like St. Louis is going to roll over and die. A team like Florida and Toronto on the other hand is gonna blast us with 25 shots and probably score 3 times in 34 minutes. When we won our titles we'd hang on for 15 minutes or so. These days we are freely giving the highest scoring teams in the league an open book test for half the game. No one is making the Lightning spend half the game without the puck now and the fact we choose to do this night after night is stupid.
We weren't defending 30 minutes a night in our Cup runs. 15 at most
Have you not seen this exact system, in one form or another, beat the Leafs out every year for a decade? That's a weird example to use. The Leafs can't win in the playoffs literally because they have refused to play this style.
My issue isn’t the system. My issue is we strayed away from what made us successful. When the system DID work we were all breathing into paper bags trying not to stroke out for 15 minutes. Using it more and longer has gotten us nowhere and effectively fixed what wasn't broken. We went from winning a period on defense to not being able to see Lightning players on the TV screen 3 minutes into the 2nd period because they're all backed up to the red line thanks to that 2 goal lead we got. In 2020 and 2021 we continued the pressure until the 3rd period at least
It was really, really a lot longer than 15 minutes. As soon as we scored a goal we spent the rest of the game killing the clock.
Against bad offenses like Montreal and NYI sure. But we approached teams differently. We didn't win the Stanley Cup punting for 40 minutes against Dallas. We'd shut down the 3rd and it worked. It's stupid to think we're gonna do 40 minutes against a team like Toronto or Florida with our 4th line being as old and slow as it is. Shut down the 3rd instead of 2/3 of the game and we are probably good
That's kind of how I meant it. We didn't sit on leads for 40 minutes vs Dallas. Other teams like Montreal that didn't have good offenses? Yeah we could get away with it. I have no problem with how we play. I just don't like the idea of hanging back for 2 periods when we won titles doing it for 20 minutes at most against an offense like Dallas.
