I hadn't fully realized until tonight just how responsible Cassidy actually is for the team's heartless play.
I mean, I knew the players themselves were soft. And I knew that Sweeney/Neely have done absolutely nothing to address that obvious flaw. But I figured that's pretty much where the blame should lie and that Cassidy was doing what he could with what he had to work with. After all, he did seem to be pushing a lot of the right buttons here. For a while at least. Now I'm seeing it differently though.
After seeing the events of tonight's game unfold the way they did, followed by Cassidy's shameful post-game interview, it's become clear that he actually wants the team to play as soft as it does and that he actively discourages any displays of heart, push back, pay back, or snarl.
What kind of coach takes an already soft group of players and demands that they tone it down even further? Who would ever consider taking the fight out of the dog to be an effective strategy in a violent sport?
Just as one example: does anyone wonder what ever happened to those bone-crunching mega hits that McAvoy used to lay fairly regularly? Well here's your answer: Cassidy has most likely instructed him to refrain from doing that, for fear he might "take himself out of position" in the process. OK, but every hockey fan knows that those hits can be absolutely game-changing, momentum-swinging, fire-lighting events whose effects far outweigh any temporary lack of "structure" they might entail. You make a natural talent like McAvoy stop being who he is as a player and you end up with this season's version of him - passive, hesitant, over thinking, lacking confidence, and ultimately his play suffers.
Again, it hadn't fully occurred to me until tonight that the softness issue was mainly due to coaching. But this quote here kind of connected the dots for me and made it all make sense:
A team that just saw it's goalie get knocked out by a dirty play does not need to hear that. What it needs is to hear something more like this:
What a joke.