EastonBlues22
Registered User
The thing about bad goaltending is that many coaches (and certainly our coaches) often try to compensate for that with a heavy defense-first mentality and with low-risk play, two things which naturally tend to cut into a team's offensive production. Having a good PP would help as well, and I think that's also heavily on the coaching. I have disagreed with a lot of what they've done on the PP for years.I think you are overselling us. We are scoring well below league average, as we did last year too. Obviously we would be better team if we replaced Allen with good goalie and had better coaching. Hopefully we can hire great coach, but that is far from guaranteed. And finding top quality goalie (not just average one even) is much harder.
We don't seem to have good enough team to be contender with average goaltending, so prudent thing to do would be to stop kidding ourselves that we are a really good team in disguise and make the necessary changes so that we can be contender in next few years.
If you have good goaltending, it's a lot easier to feel like you can be more aggressive...consistently try to gain the offensive zone with possession (at the risk of potentially turning it over and giving an odd-man break in the other direction), send three forwards low in the zone to create pressure/offense (rather than keeping that third forward high), etc.
When you don't have good goaltending, you often get the opposite, and we have definitely seen that from the Blues on the ice this year. This isn't a roster that's built to grind out low-outcome victories, and this isn't a league that rewards that style of play anymore, but the Blues have backed themselves into a corner where they think that's the only way they can win.
Maybe the offensive talent isn't good enough to be more than middle of the pack as constructed anyway, but this team (even as incoherently constructed as it is) isn't a bottom five team in terms of offensive talent. It shouldn't even be close. I firmly believe that it would be more productive with better coaching and better goaltending.