DQ is a clown. The quote about 18/19 year Olds that are set in their ways is nonsense.. we're not talking about run of the mill prospects here, we're talking about high end draft picks. He was so focused on the meat and potatoes stuff that he forgot these guys were drafted to be game breakers. Let them play their game.
Yeah, a coach is definitely not entirely a product of the environment he has been in — but — a coach’s previous environment will have exposed some weakness and left some unexposed.
DQ was uncertain and very bound to his college ways. If you as a college coach get Jack Eichel on your team, what must be done? It’s simple, get him to adhere to some kind of high minimum standard across the board — and his offensive game and production will come by itself. He is that much better than the avg guy in the NCAA. In the NHL, it’s instead a tremendous challenge for a kid to get to a level where he can produce offensively.
As an organization we sought someone experienced working with kids — but in reality we needed someone who was good at bringing kids into the NHL. These things weren’t the same.
That is one thing. But what also became apparent was that DQ had so many bad habits, which had not been exposed in the past because a coach of a strong recruiting NCAA team is tremendously mighty and is held accountable to a bare minimum.
A NHL player will have demands on their coach. The team will require that the coach does his part. In the NCAA, to a very large extent, players are at the mercy of their coach. If a coach wants it, he can easily really hurt the career of most players at that level. What can a young kid do about it?In the NHL, DQ was constantly out in the media throwing players under the buss, calling them unacceptable, taking credit for their improvement attributing it to him disciplining them.
Why is that done? For the good of the team? For the good of the players? Of course not, it was for the good of DQ, at the cost of the players. Some of these things can be hard to ever wash away. You are at least scared of that as a player. I mean, that is why all teams talk about ‘keeping things in the room’. It’s not good for the team to bring them out to the media. DQ was really stunned when the players called him out for it. He had lived in his all mighty NCAA bubble his entire life (almost).
Another example is how reactionary he was to media’s amateurish view of the team accompanied with totally unproprotionate responses. Right after the TDA incident the entire team really bought into DQs new plan. That new plan was 10x more N-S than the Islanders ever played under Trotz. Of course, with tremendous consequences to individual players of the team.
Like really, you don’t take risks with the puck, move it around, because it is fun. You do it to lock up really capable defenses of NHL teams. Surely, there is a balance act going on here, and you err on both sides of it at different times. But when we stop doing that altogether — are you surprised if your top guys stop scoring??
Still, DQ was at the presser after each game throwing the top scorers of the team under the buss for not scoring. In essence: ‘I love our defense, that is my doing, but the problem is the players who stopped scoring, it’s their fault’. You knew instantly that he would loose the room completely after that. And for a good reason, it was just tremendously poor coaching with zero outlooks for success. And in addition, he took zero responsibility for it. I don’t know Basketball, never played it, can’t make a good analogy. But in my world it’s like if you have a player X that scores 80% of his pts from 3 point shots, and your coach goes ‘we won’t risk taking any more 3 point shots’ and then blames player X for not scoring when it doesn’t work out. No reporters around the NYR knows even anything basic about the game of hockey. DQ got questions, why aren’t X scoring, ‘it’s a mystery, just as I solve the defense, X stops producing’ was his response.
During the spring, we had totally abandoned that style, and was a mess on the ice, DQ was sitting there and was asked, hey in November you played solid defense for a while, what happened? And answers, “from my POV, nothing, I still want the team to play that way”. You have never before heard anything like that and you will never again hear anything like that. A team in the NHL that doesn’t even remotely play like the coach wants. At least except Howden and depth players. It landed like he would have said ‘I want my players to work harder’ instead of ‘the players don’t give a crap about the most fundamental aspects of our game plan’.
It’s for not stepping in after that, which lost Gorton his job. And honestly, the fact that the organization did not react showed how incompetent and rotten it really was. You had people at this place with connections into the organization going ‘nothing odd with that, think everything is fine, 50/50 if something should be changed for next year’. We should be tremendously happy that Drury’s purge if nothing else has eliminated the people, who could be asleep at the wheel at a situation like that, from the organization.
