"Move your feet to take shots"
"We went 7 games"
Lol. First of all, we went 7 games because of Vasilevskiy making unreal save after unreal save in 2/3 of those wins and basically stealing two of them. Secondly, go look at the Hawks who played pretty much 3-4 defenseman for entire games and managed to win the cup. Look at the pens with Dumoulin, Schultz, Maata, Cole, Letang, etc., they aren't inept at getting the puck through but their group on the backend is inferior to what we have.
As a coach, you play to your strengths the most that you can and limit what a team can do to play against your weaknesses. We played a series where we let Washington play to our weaknesses by hemming us in the zone. Continuously trying to make plays in our end and failing to get the puck out after 2, 3, or 4 attempts cost us quite a few goals. Allowing late goals to kill an entire game untimely hurt as well. We rarely played to our strength as our players struggled on connecting with passes - with speed - and entering their zone. Our defense showed a huge weakness which I imagine stems from Bowness of how much we respected them at the blue line as by the time we "started" to defend we were at the tops of the circles and 2/3 forwards were already beaten. We had no game plan on how to make it uncomfortable for them or how to adjust. Nearly every period of that series was a carbon copy. If anyone thinks we won more than one game (I'll grant us that) because we outplayed them and didn't rely on Vasy to bail us out is in denial.
There's no "we took them 7 games" to be proud of. Anybody that remembers this for years to come knows it was Vasy that CARRIED us to 7 games. And that was after letting in a lot of goals in games 1 and 2, where we had home ice advantage.
My biggest problem is, look at the make up of this team. We are small and that series made it tough on a lot of guys, the usual suspects disappearing, etc, but compare it to previous years. That Pens defense was a pretty well oiled machine for TWO years where they didn't have Letang for one of them. They had a style that played to their strength and that was offense. One pass, out of the zone. Under pressure? Get it out and deal with it as a 5 man unit. Hawks relied on 66% of their defensive group and still won a cup doing that. You play to your strengths and you coach and make adjustments so you can maximize the ability to play to your strengths. This ECF didn't show me that. At all.