Assuming Carlson stays.....come on, dude. I will return to something Ive said before. Laviolette's game depends on a deep commitment to offense from his defense corp. A second defense pair with next to no ability to put up offense along with a 3rd pair that is similar is going to kill that system. Do you think Laviolette needs to change his game or be replaced?
You keep saying this, but you really don’t understand what you’re saying.
Lavi’s system relies on the D to be willing to forecheck up to the halfboards are part of what he calls a “2-3 forecheck” (which is just a 2-1-2 with activated D). It DOES NOT require all your defensemen to log high point totals.
2nd and 3rd pairings with no high point totals will kill the system? Really? Let’s look at Lavi’s Stanley Cup winning team. Kaberle could put up points from the blue line, no question there. The next best offensive D was…. Bret Hedican who scored 30 points a whopping ZERO times in his career. Each of Commodore, Wallin, Ward, and Wesley played all 25 playoff games, and none scored more than 5 points. Sure seems like he did pretty well that year with 2 pairings not totaling a lot of points…
Okay, what about his other successful teams? The Flyers squad he led to the finals had 3 D with good points totals, but more than 50% of Timonens scoring was coming on the power play. The Coburn/Timmo pairing didn’t put up much offensively at even strength in the playoffs, despite the fact that Lavi was basically just rolling 2 pairings.
His 2017 Predators team is the only one that he’s gone deep with that relied heavily on scoring from the D, and that’s because that D corps was loaded and the forward group wasn’t exactly a bunch of superstars.
