He is a dead man walking at this point. I think he is gone within the next 10 games unless things radically change. You can be disorganized but show good effort and you can be very organized with ho hum effort. You can't however be disorganized and show no effort. Last night was an awful bellwether for him.
I still contend fans over explain performance with coaching, but something is clearly, clearly wrong at this point.
I generally agree about coaching complains when it is a short term evaluation, fans tend to typically over blame coaches for a bad 5 game stretch. As noted though with Lalonde we are onto season 3 now and we still seeing the same problems.
1. This roster has seen significant turnover over the 3 years so you can't just say its a bad apple here or there causing the inconsistent gameplay & efforts. There has been enough turnover that if someone wasn't seeing eye to eye with the coach they should be gone by now. (IE See Walman)
2. The only repeatable system setup I can see is the stupid long drop pass we use almost every single time to try and gain entry on the PP. Not that I love to watch it, but there are plenty of teams that employ a simple defensive system to make up for their lack of talent. The only way Lalonde seems to be able to coach is full tilt offense or full tilt defense. If we try for anything in between we fall apart, which again to me is a systems and deployment issue. We have no designed breakouts. Forwards and D both tend to lose their guys on a regular basis. Our PP is horribly predictable even though at least PP1 has plenty of skill on it.
3. The only player in his 3 seasons that I can say looks better than when he came in is Raymond. Seider I think has somewhat regressed in his decision making since Blash left. None of our Dman in general ever look like they know where the puck should go.
4. Team consistently starts slow. We don't have the talent to constantly have to claw our way back into games, especially if we aren't employing the full tilt offensive method.
5. He's getting a bit better this year but he has been notoriously slow to make a lineup change. I'm not asking for a Scotty blender, but if something is clearly not working don't hang onto it just because one guy is a vet.
