What does "preparing his team" consist of exactly? No cliches. Just tell us what he should be doing differently to "prepare" his team. Every f***ing fan on earth knows when the game starts. It is pretty common knowledge published on schedule. Why grown men being paid millions of dollars need to have another grown man cup their nuts and spank them on the ass and tell them to be ready to play is beyond me. Pride alone and fear of embarrassing yourself should be incentive enough. Perhaps we need more internally motivated players.
For the record our inability to start on time dates back to the final years of Pav and Z. We have seen it through three head coaches and god knows how many assistants.
If Yzerman thinks the team has tunned him out, let him go and find someone new. Expecting materially different results, however, is extremely foolish given it is the players who play the game.
How am I supposed to say what he should be doing differently if I have no way of knowing what he's currently doing? You seem to think it's pretty well all on the players, so what do you think a coach does exactly? Because if you don't think that motivating and focusing the team is a part of their duties, then you have a fundamental lack of understanding of what a coach does. A coach sets the tone for a team, focuses the team towards a collective goal, and helps motivate the players, individually and as a team, towards that goal. Go watch any behind the scenes NHL series (24/7 series following the Caps and Penguins is a good option) and you'll see how much the coaches are involved in those aspects of things.
And no, while every team has a slow start on occasion, including previous Wings rosters, this season has gone beyond what we've seen in the recent past. And in case you didn't notice, those Wings teams since Zetterberg retired have been universally awful. They weren't slow starters, they were just bad in all 3 periods. This year is different, they've shown what they're capable of and have turned it on in the 2nd and 3rd periods on many occasions. That's why they're at the top of the league for comeback wins. The problem is they have so many comeback wins because they dig themselves into a hole at the starts of games even more often.
If it was as simple as the players being paid professionals and showing up and doing their jobs then this wouldn't be a problem. Or are you suggesting the Wings, out of a 700+ player league, just happen to have a collection of players that don't start on time, but for some reason decide to collectively turn it on later? Because that would be an incredible coincidence.
They've shown they can be better, this has been a consistent problem all season, and Lalonde has not been able to come up with a way to extract the kinds of performances in the 1st period that we know they're capable of. That's on him just as much, if not more, than the players.
