I'll cut Warsofsky some slack because this has all been handled very "rookie coach in charge for the first time at this level"--which is not to excuse how he's handled it but to say it's definitely been poor but we can only hope he learns from this.
I am not a fan of that approach.
People need to understand Walman being scratched has nothing to do with his on ice play. He clearly did something that was serious enough that required a benching.
Did one of them break a team rule?
I learned many years ago as a young manager that you praise in public and criticize in private. Warsofsky could have easily sent Walman the same message by sitting him without making it so public.
The message was intended for the locker room and not Walman. I’m sure if it was an issue that didn’t apply to the rest of the team it would have been dealt with privately.
What else was Warso supposed to say to explain why Walman wasn't going to be in the lineup on Tuesday? I don't think he should have lied and claimed Walman was too injured to play when that apparently wasn't the case. Warso kept it to a vague "coach's decision" until he was asked again and we still don't know the specifics.
"Coach's decision related to the injury." Best of all worlds, shows that Warso overruled Walman, sends the message publicly to the locker room if that was needed, but doesn't create more threads that Sheng & Co & Fans want to pull on.
I've never heard of a player being scratched due to maintenance. I feel like this would have invited more suspicion.
Sounds like it wasn't injury related though. "We're about the team and getting better as an organization, our culture, our standards" is a pretty damning indictment. We'll likely never know what happened but IMO there's too much smoke around Walman being addicted to Fortnite/video games to ignore.
Until we know what that reason is, we can't really say if any of this is or isn't justified. Warsofsky is still young and inexperienced relatively speaking. He's going to need to legitimize himself in certain ways as a coach that the players aren't always going to like. He may also make mistakes during this process. I'm just saying that we're legitimately rebuilding the franchise at every level with someone inexperienced that we're counting on making good decisions consistently but not perfectly.
I find it far more likely that (as I posted elsewhere) it's how Walman handled the hit, versus some video game theory.
