What do you think should happen with Derek Lalonde?

[JohanFranzenstein]

Fire him into the sun. Have Boogs interim until the end of the season or until someone more appealing (Monty, Lambert) is available, whichever comes first.

f*** Coach Q, dude can eat a dick. I'd rather have a dead last team for 10 more years than someone who covered up a rape.

 

[stillwater]

How many of you were expecting this team to be as good or better than last years team?

Personally, when I look at the roster, it was pretty clear to me that we should all be expecting to see a step back.

With that in mind, I find it hard to pin this on the coach. Would a change help? Maybe, but the off-season roster turnover was mostly downgrades across the board.

Ghost -> Gustavsson
Perron -> tarasenko
Sprong -> berggren
Fabbri -> Kasper
Walman -> Holl

Some of these are good long term moves (kasper) but otherwise this team is just worse and I’m not sure Lalonde should be the one to pay the price for that.

Perron has zero points with Ottawa.
Sprong has already been cut loose for nothing from Vancouver.
Fabbri has done nothing in Anaheim and Kasper is part of the long-term makeup of this team.

Ghost is better than Gustavsson for sure, but was ragged on by this board for 95% of the season last year. His effort during the late playoff run seems a bit of a stretch for nostalgia.

As far as Walman goes, Simon Edvinsson has effectively taken his place, not Holl.

 

[The Flying Octopus]

Surprised he wasn’t let go today. Honestly, it needs to happen. Then trade away someone of significance. This is a country club as we speak. Zero accountability.

 

[Euro Twins]

I thought a regression was very possible this season. A lot of unlikely comeback wins last season, a lot of unsustainable production from a mediocre D, too many defensive issues and not enough appropriate new help added. But this is a collapse, not a regression, despite less roster turnover than last year. When you get solid veteran character types like Copp and Compher making negative public comments or simply not putting in enough effort on a backcheck like last night, it's just another sign of a huge problem in the coach-player dynamic, if more evidence was even needed.

SY had this problem in TB, missing the playoffs two years in a row after reaching Game 7 of the Conference final, and fired Boucher 31 games into the second of those two seasons. There were only 17 games left that year and he was replaced by interim co-head coaches who didn't have any solutions either. It might be tempting to go the same route this season, interim replacement(s) and take what comes out of it. The way they've drafted in the first round, a higher Draft pick than expected could be interesting. NJ lucked into Jack Hughes by dropping 25 points from the previous year.

Well Cooper was hired to replace Boucher for those last 17 games. We know how that ended up, it was not an interim coach though.

 

[nhlisawesome]

Unbelievable. He's still here this organization does not give a f***

 

[Realgud]

Perron has zero points with Ottawa.
Sprong has already been cut loose for nothing from Vancouver.
Fabbri has done nothing in Anaheim and Kasper is part of the long-term makeup of this team.

Ghost is better than Gustavsson for sure, but was ragged on by this board for 95% of the season last year. His effort during the late playoff run seems a bit of a stretch for nostalgia.

As far as Walman goes, Simon Edvinsson has effectively taken his place, not Holl.

Good post. Hard to argue with any of this. I think we look back fondly on these players because of where the team ended up at the end of the year but it just so happen that they were firing on all cylinders for most of the season before the big collapse. I don't think they would come close to replicating that type of offense if they were still on the team right now. The way they were scoring wasn't sustainable in any way. That said, I don't think Yzerman did a proper job replacing or improving the players at these positions, and I think that's where most of the complaints can realistically come from. I think he did well getting Talbot and giving kids more opportunities, but having Chiarot-Petry on the second pair is inexcusable.