as i said earlier, the horvat 4th line thing is the first willie thing i'd call out as appearing to be outright stupid (from the outside). i sympathize with the idea of granlund needing good guys to play better, but the way it was described seems ridiculous and the fact horvat stated publicly he expected to play with baertschi indicates he is (rightly) pissed. the obvious solution is to create 3 third lines mixing the wingers evenly or to give horvat an energy line of something like gaunce/virtanen to go cause havoc. the naive idea that burrows/dorsett are going to shut down top lines and the idea of robbing horvat of the chance to score points after he has done everything you asked of him just is too breathlessly stupid to take in. the genie is out of the bottle. letting a top prospect be creative and undisciplined and taste apparent success then unduly reigning them in is toxic. it is how the oilers have repeatedly ruined or setback their top draft choices.
we'll see how many minutes horvat gets and what chances he gets. hopefully a tempest in a teapot but still troublingly clueless.
as for willie's overall coaching, i don't see rolling 4 lines as a bad thing. it was the right thing after torts blew the team up shortening the bench the year before, and it was the right thing to develop players last year. it makes sense for a rebuilding team with aging veterans playing well beyond the level of the rest of the team. i actually see it as the team's only shot and a good way to develop young talent. as soon as you start matching or zone starts or sheltering younger players you end up overplaying the sedins. even in their prime they would run out of gas over a season. how much they can take today and how much that plays into line strategy is something that gets overlooked.
and blaming too many men penalties on willie is interesting since he's not directly managing the changes. in any event, it's not a weighty factor in assessing the guy for me. a better critique is how badly the canucks played last year in overtime and 4 on 4. we used to thrive on that. since willie came along, we look lost.
anyway, we'll see this year. willie is playing for his job. and he's said he is done developing. i'd like him to roll 4 lines as much as he can but i expect him to line match, shorten the bench and everything else to stay afloat until the sedins crash and burn. we'll see how that goes.
