My biggest issue with laying the full blame on the players is that the coach really hasn't tried anything new. He's employing largely the same basic scheme albiet more restricted this year and the results aren't there.
Would not a smart coach say "Ok we now have about 100 games of data and things aren't going the way we anticipated so let's make some structural tweaks and see if it will improve some results" There is a good saying and that is focus on what you can control. As a coach you can control the systems, I've time, lineups. Use those tools to get the desired results. I don't believe he is fully making use of the tools he has.
I also don't buy that a group of professional athletes, many of which had to bust their asses to get to this level are inherently lazy. Maybe Maurice needs to go to his players and ask them how they think as a team they will be successful and meet them half way on some items as its clear to me that there is a lack of engagement from certain players.
I'm kind of blown away that there's a single system in place period. I know probably a lot here hate basketball but even in high school our coach had four different "looks" on defence depending on what the other team was bringing. Three of them were zones with different structures and man to man for the fourth D. I'm not a hockey coach but how hard would it be to implement two systems - zone and man (or even a mix of the two?). You switch them up depending on the opponent and how you match up with them. I would think mixing them up in game would be a heck of an approach as well. We ran all four schemes within every game - rarely the same scheme down the floor twice in row, but it did happen if the other team wasn't working against it very well. Now obviously hockey isn't basketball but it's not that much more complicated if at all. And while I might occasionally poke fun at how smart some hockey players might be, they certainly haven't achieved this level by being as dumb as a bunch of high school basketball kids.
I don't dislike Maurice. I didn't dislike Noel either. In fact I love their interviews as they both are quite articulate and seem genuinely quite sharp. But that isn't enough at this point.
While I do agree that Maurice should get a little break given the defensive core he was saddled with this year, at the same time, as has been pointed out many times, we are seeing the exact same issues we saw last year from December on. So it's nowhere near as simple as bad D players. Yes, that plays a role, no question, but January through April last year was pretty darn awful. I don't remember the metrics from October-December of the prior season, but if they were similar to this year of the same time frame then the issue has really very little to do with the staffing on the D, it's a bad scheme that isn't working.
