darksabre

Tampa's graph is ridiculous

I would be fine with that. The important part of that Reinhart goal was that he shot the puck. It's like they're completely different players when they know it's 5v5.

The second PP unit started one of the PP opportunities tonight and I thought that was a good call. PP2 doesn't waste much time getting shots on net. PP1 still doesn't know what to do with the puck when they have it. It's very weird.

Losing to Tampa doesn't bother me much since we're not catching them in the standings, but it makes last night's loss a lot worse. I didn't think they played a bad game. The PP still needs work.

Like Tampa needed this game handed to them. Thanks stripes.

My feed crapped out so I missed the Eichel penalty. Did we get jobbed?

There's no way Larsson should have gotten a penalty there.

That's not really fair to Linus lol

Brutal

You rang?

Not a bad period but some of our skill guys are overhandling the puck. Sometimes a simple play is okay.

He was at the end of his shift though. Knock Sobotka for being crap at clearing the puck too.

Extremely unusual but I'll take it!

Domingue sucks lol

It's funny how bad the power play can look but then they know exactly what to do 5v5.

That's not the point at all. Maybe you're one of those people who poopoos fancy stats, but the fancy stats were right about what this team was doing during the streak: getting extremely lucky.

This is factually incorrect. The underlying metrics of the streak indicate, clear as day, that they were extremely lucky.

It's clearly a coaching failure. That much seems to be obvious. They have the talent. They should be able to execute a plan if they know what that plan is and they practice it. But they don't look like they know what the plan is.

Think about it like this. If Jack is the one they want shooting on the power play then he's the guy who should be handling the puck the least. The most important guys are the RW and RD. The power play should flow through them to Jack. But it's not working like that. Instead Jack and the LD (Dahlin) are doing most of the work, which basically forces the play through Reinhart/Skinner. But those guys aren't shooting because they think the PP is about Jack. It looks like no one has any idea who the focus of the PP is. Which is the difference between our usage of Jack on the LW versus Ovechkin. Ovechkin just does little circles and tries to lose coverage while his teammates work to set him up. Washington knows who the PP is trying to set up. Buffalo doesn't seem too sure.

I think if Eichel isn't going to actually shoot from the half wall then he shouldn't be there. He needs to shoot. That's the biggest problem right now. He's too patient. He gets the puck, decides he doesn't have a lane, and then ends up passing it back to his point man. If Eichel is so worried about having a lane then they need to move more to shake the coverage up on him to give him the open space he thinks he needs. Eichel drives that power play in theory, but not in practice.

"liberal media"

Losing last night makes me feel better about our odds tonight. I would have preferred to win last night though for the sake of the playoffs. Oh well. Got my coffee and a good night's sleep.

I would even give it a try again tomorrow. I think Jack needing to shake the rust off was maybe something we should have accounted for in the experiment. Either way, it was worth trying. I actually liked Okposo's game tonight and would be willing to try him on Jack's wing again. Really just need Reinhart to have his own line.

Not happy about that loss. Carolina, like Boston, is a team you have to attack. You have to attack them to neutralize the forecheck. But that strategy just doesn't seem to be in the "gameplan". Sometimes you can point to talent as the issue. But I thought this game was well within reach in that respect. So I'm going to officially gripe about coaching for the first time this season. I think our useless PP is a big problem and I think the fact that we keep losing to teams that forecheck us to death is a big problem. Bad bounces killed us, but they killed us because of the bigger issues. Which are, in part, coaching related.

Yay! Puck luck for us!