North Cole
♧ Lem
- Jan 22, 2017
- 11,548
- 12,962
Woodys problem was he shit the bed in his first camp and preseason, he's not a bad coach hes just inexperienced in that facet of the job. Took way too long to make cuts and seemingly gave Bakersfield players a longer than necessary look. Idk if thats loyalty to old guys he coached down there or just rookie indecision but it cost this team a few steps at the start of the year.So I’m a Trotz fan lol. Can’t deny Woody was struggling in the first half. Second half the teams played far better, but the main praise has to go to Holland. Ekholm has been a Godsend.
That said Woody has played the cards right to get us to this point and once again like last season is showing a nice touch.
Happy to be incorrect that he’s a mediocre coach. He’s doing well with what he now has. Let’s see him take it all the way and I’ll be appropriately ecstatic!
Team went through their normal doldrums in December but I think part of the issue with woodcroft is that he's a roster mechanic. In the long run its good, because he's seen and operated on every single permutation of the lines with different personnel. In the short term that causes problems because he will try things that don't work and then the team gets into a slump.
In the long run you can find solutions to most any problem because you have already worked on a bunch of options and probably cultivated self inflicted problems you had to clean up. They put McDavid and drai on a line together against la and I was worried because if danault keeps them both slowed down you get rekt. At least separate drai was scoring vs Kopitar.
What I didn't expect was the random nuge/bjug combo totally bodying Kopitar/kempe. Him and kempe went from sort of even with drai to doing nothing and then Tmac actually chased the Kempitar/mcdrai match up because his top line stopped scoring. Danault has zero offense so Woody didn't care and I assume tmac thought Fiala third line would be the difference if he could go even with mcdrai, but kostin Ryan smoked them too and it was credits after that. The mcdrai actually caused tmac to big brain himself and then they gave up 4 5on5 goals in the elimination game. Slot was open for business and korpisalo collapsed.
Hes a much better line constructor than he gets credit for.