Lahti obviously made it in as a consequence of Wirtanen getting hurt. Jalonen needed every centre he could get so he could swap 'em in and out in hopes of possibly finding someone who could glue the 2nd line together. (And no, Lahti is not that guy, but he can be used in lower lines to promote Koskiranta, for example.)
So saying he should have been swapped for winger X is really not an option. Besides, if Gaps is right, Jormakka will go if Korpikoski comes.
Therefore, I quote myself from the other thread:
If you wish to rage against useless picks, at least direct them towards the correct players. Haataja (-82), Mäntylä (-81), and Viitaluoma (-81) are the ones who we'll probably see never again.
Besides, they're guys slated for upper echelon roles. Every team needs its grinders, and at least those are somewhat youthful. We would possibly be raging even more than we do now if Jalonen actually took all our young guns in and then assigned them fourth line minutes because he was forced to leave out some of the bottom-six workhorses as a consequence.
Miika Lahti is not the issue here. He's a 4th line grinder at best, and rather youthful (-87 born) at that. This team can't go on completely without players like him.
You wanna rage against someone, rage against Haataja. He's made of the same material as all those other Jalonen veteran "scorer" picks like Hyvönen, Kerman, Janne Lahti - put up points in preliminaries, become useless in the games. His perceived role is much closer to that Armia's could have been.
I wouldn't be surprised if the game plan this time turned out to be as follows: 1) Place a brick wall in net- can be done, the goalies won't be the downfall of this team, 2) Try to score a goal- even that will take a lot of work, but it's not impossible and 3) Hang on for dear life after that goal and hope the brick wall doesn't go down- well, they've got to have more fight in them than we've seen up to this point if they want to complete this part of the plan.
Isn't that the Aravirta recipe of winning - one Raimo Helminen also tried to employ on his stint as the U20 coach?
Jalonen had a crappy team on 2009 as well, and yet he never tried to utilize that plan back then either. No, this team will at least try to go forward. Most of the time they'll be likely stopped at the neutral zone, but they won't just shut down and form a wall around the own blueline. Jalonen hates that kind of game.