Puckatron 3000
Glitchy Prototype
This looks like the most recent “coach” thread. If not my apologies.
Maurice was out coached last night and it started with the lineup card.
Laviolette knows Maurice enough to know that if he dressed Hartnell, Maurice would keep Hendricks in the lineup. This then made th Jets a 3 line team and advantage Preds.
Early on the Preds went right at that 4th line by making quick changes and getting a couple favourable match ups.
In playoff hockey when the line is so close between teams small things make a big difference.
Hendricks certainly did not cost us the game but he did not give us the best chance to win.
We could have had a much better balanced lineup on the ice last night. Would be nice to get a 4th line goal rather than be fishing the puck out of our own net. For their 6 minutes of play the 4th line stunk for the most part.
Hopefullly Maurice can have a bounce back game. He can start by dressing a more competitive lineup and making some adjustments.
I hope he can change my view of him as an NHL coach.
I'm about as big of Maurice supporter as you'll find around here. But I would agree this is a plausible explanation of what happened. Laviolette dressed some goons, which may have tilted Maurice to play Hendricks over Roslovic. Then Laviolette unexpectedly had his team play a super disciplined, tight game, causing Maurice to underplay his 4th line. We're guessing here on the thought processes behind the benches, but this strikes me as a decent guess.
We cannot say whether Roslovic would have made any difference to the outcome. Despite his talent, his "rookie-ness" has been evident in the series. And who knows, maybe Laviolette would have gooned it up a bit more, depending on how Maurice played his hand. Perhaps if both Roslovic and Perreault*** had played last night, in place of bigger/tougher players, Laviolette would have taken more liberties with our guys, and we could even be looking at a loss, plus injured players right now. But regardless, we can say that our 4th line didn't help very much last night. And we lost, albeit to the best team in the league, staring down the barrel of a 3-1 deficit.
The only disagreement I have with your post would be your last line: "I hope he can change my view of him as an NHL coach". In my opinion you, like many others on this forum, hyper-magnify the things disagree with the coach on (even though we as fans are operating with only a fraction of the information that the coaches base their decisions on), and seem to ignore the much larger body of work that has resulted in us playing dead even in the playoffs against the best team in the league. Coaches get outplayed sometimes. Players get outplayed sometimes. Teams get outplayed sometimes. They can still be good coaches, players, and teams.
*** Note: I'm operating under the assumption that Perreault is not fully healthy. If he was, of course I would agree he should be in the line-up.
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