OldTimeHockey said:
Last night's loss has nothing to do with coaching. Screaming for his head is shortsighted at best.
When you have a group of 23 players coughing up the puck and players skating like they're stuck in mud it has nothing to do with coaching. It has to do with players that simply put in a terrible effort and it showed.
Giving up 2 on 1's isn't part of any coaching system. It's part of a poor team showing they are poor at playing the sport.
Franson and Gardiner should be sat up in the press box for a couple games. Both were terrible.....no scratch that, horrible last night.
The team definitely sucked last night, and by no means do any of them get a pass on that loss. Everyone contributed to that stinkfest.
But Carlyle is at the top of the list, for a number of reasons:
1. He dressed both Orr and McLaren against a team with no real fighters. Combined, they have ZERO points and 9 shots in a combined 34 games, and are -3. Even after they were down 4-0 these guys were getting offensive zone starts.
And neither of them fought, so WTF?
And who were his healthy scratches? Holland and Smith: 7 points, 17 shots, and +1 in 17 games.
2. After two goals are let in within 22 seconds, Carlyle just stands there behind the bench chewing his gum, and says ZERO words to his team. Every time the camera was on him last night, he was just standing there, hopeless. I assume he said some things during the intermissions, but he made the absolute minimum effort to fire up, guide, or, you know,
coach his team during each period. I'm not even sure if he used his time-out.
3. I think most coaches would have pulled Reimer after that 3rd goal - not because Reimer was stinking it up, exactly, but because there was NO life in the team at all, and Reims was getting hung out to dry. He faced 50 shots in a game that went through overtime into a 4-round shoot-out only two days before, so it's reasonable to assume the guy might be a little tired, too; Bernier was fresh and putting him in could have at least done SOMETHING to the game. Again, Carlyle just sat there and did nothing until long after the game was a joke.
4. The Leafs are a giveaway machine and Carlyle has done nothing effective to change this - if anything, I think he's made it worse. There's a reason this team is being outshot like any other, regardless of which line is on the ice - his system does not work.
These stupid stretch-pass-tip-in plays that he seems to insist on running do not work. That's what Gardiner was trying to accomplish when he iced the puck in what led to the 1st goal. It's a stupid play, and a sane coach would tell his players to cut that nonsense out - instead, it's Carlyle's go-to play.
I'm not even going to go into detail on the "outshot 90% of the time" stuff, or the turnovers, or the stuff about how the Leafs are only where they are now due to unusually and possibly unsustainably good goaltending because we've all heard that before. But there it is.
5. Even if it somehow isn't his fault, coaches are usually the first to go when their teams are stinking it up. Carlyle should be no different.
This is a good team, even injured, and games like these are incredibly winnable. They didn't just lose this one, they humiliated themselves, and the most frustrating thing about it for me was watching Carlyle just stand there a cardboard cut-out. If there's any silver lining to this loss, I hope it's that Carlyle either shapes up or ships out.
