It's just one among many areas that are below average way too often.
More and more I think that run was a sort of sense of destiny once they got past Pittsburgh. It was a tide-changing, over-the-hump win where the ghosts were vanquished, they could take a breath, relax and get on with fulfilling a life-long goal with extreme confidence. They had all of the guts, all of the depth performances to put it together. It's tough. It's a high bar. It's grueling. Some of that's just narrative but it takes constant dedication to reach higher levels of performance and you wonder about the collective drive. It's been questionable all-around given how much existing skill they've had to work with. More often than not, for whatever reason, levels of improvement have eluded them. Now it's a race against time and the sort of thing if they're not careful can close shut a lot quicker than they realize. It may already have barring something significant.
They're a good organization but they increasingly aren't forward-looking in approach and that lack of vision makes them extremely limited. Part of that is Laviolette and the marriage of convenience in being aggressive today by the most conventional means possible but they still need some vision and plan toward continual improvement. They're not good enough to just show up and grind every day, rinse and repeat. Yet it's not at all evident that perspective exists aside from maybe defense. It's obviously talked about in a way that's very detailed and comes with a high standard and sense of discipline but everything else is like an afterthought. Hard not to question their direction when so many areas seem so dysfunctional. Then from just a core athleticism standpoint I don't know that the window hasn't shut given the general state of Backstrom, Carlson and Oshie. Three key players and ones that increasingly don't have the look of being high mileage in the playoffs barring some sort of magical alignment better insulating them. Best-case all of this adversity eventually leads to a better underlying game but nothing they've said suggests a forthcoming payoff. This is just what they are and, again, it's not acceptable, not enough.
With Ovechkin they've had the opportunity to work toward becoming a model franchise. For a while they drafted well from a skill standpoint and it enabled them to sustain a deep, competitive roster. Now? It's hard to believe there's a sustainable, balanced and savvy direction under such tight and unimaginative coaching. Depth players like Sprong and McMichael must provide cheap depth production and it's hard when they're philosophically devalued. When the standard is so high for defense over everything else and yet, oh yeah, he are our sieves in net. Hard times. With stability in net it's probably a lot different but here we are. As far as model organizations go Tampa Bay is right up there. Pittsburgh maybe not far behind from a next man up mentality. Carolina. Florida. Vegas. Colorado. It's less about youth per se than culture and cohesion. Edmonton & Toronto have youth but the collective cohesion isn't there. It's a high bar but those final finishing touches haven't been there and they increasingly seem to be weakening across the board.
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