Unfortunately, the bad vibe before the start of the tourney about Spott was proven completely correct. He absolutely messed up the team.
- Started with bad player selections. Playing favorites to OHL players showed a complete lack of professionalism.
- Losing control and confusing his young players when he blamed officiating for obvious late/bad hits instead of teaching the players accountability and proper way to play physically.
- Kept playing his own guy, Ryan "Offenseman" Murphy.
- Mishandled the goaltenders. Said to go all the way with Subban but then played Binnington in the medal game. It's like telling the players this Bronze medal game is not important. Completely wrong message to the players. And it wasn't Subban's fault or him playing badly in the American's game. Binnington has not started a game since Dec 8, almost a month ago and he is supposed to save the day!?
Spott was trying to make a great coaching move in his own mind to go with Binnington, but the flip flopping actually proved his incompetence.
Like I said before the tournament, and I usually don't say things like that about a coach especially not knowing much about him, but every time he talked, I just felt like he's a scam. May be scam was the bad choice of word. I am sure we've all met that guy who talked like he knows everything, but after 5 min of him talking you know he is full of bs, a dumb arse and a phony.
And Murphy the Offensive Defenseman. Well, let's take the word defense out and call him an "Offense man". He could neither defend physical forwards nor skilled/speedy forwards, so what's the point of having a guy like that in the team as a defenseman if the only time he can contribute is on the PP? For every one chance Murphy created, he gave up 3 chances to the other team to score on us. If Murphy had problem defending players younger than him in a junior tourney, he's gonna get destroyed in the NHL. There may be very few past successful cases, but he should consider turning into a forward as he may have a better career as a forward in the NHL if he's gonna have one.
When's the last time Russia had better goaltending tandem than Canada? Vasilevski was as good or better than Subban, and Makarov was as good and quite a bit better than Binnington.
Good for Ufa the small town Russia, winning a medal game even being a bronze is great for them.
RNH was brilliant. 15 pts on Canada's 27 goals. Without him, this team is really very mediocre.