They absolutely know. It's completely confounding. Every year we play like absolute turd until the last possible moment for a playoff push, or there's an injury to one or two of the big guys, suddenly Sully is like 'maybe we should try something different' and then we play well for a month or so. But as soon as the pressure is released, he goes straight back to his dumb ideas. Bylsma was exactly the same.
I think the issue here is the last 20 of last season is what this season is essentially, they abandoned any defensive structure the last 20 games and I think that was because Sullivan might have just relieved Reirden of his duties on the bench and took over if anything, because the same issues persist this season. Last year we had some sort of structure and the team wasn’t bad defensively the first 3-4 months, if anything they’d suck at scoring goals but were fairly average defensively, then in late February you slowly started them to just abandon any structure altogether and its carried over to this season.
They are doing the back to back cup run type of shit without any structure and that’s Sullivan being desperate, odd man rushes but can’t transition out, Pens all rush up and get caught, are clueless in their end, go and look back at any game from March to April last season and it’s the same, the only difference is the Pens were scoring at a higher rate, Ned was still bleeding 3+ goals a game.
All of this is a carry over from the last 20 games but worse.
