Flames Fire Coaching Staff

[Reds4Life]

If Smith stayed healthy, Flames might have made the playoffs. That said, the Flames' coaching staff wasn't very good.

 

[Fig]

If Smith stayed healthy, Flames might have made the playoffs. That said, the Flames' coaching staff wasn't very good.

I think they had their pros and cons, but the cons definitely outweighed the pros. I will say that these guys aren't trash. Just perhaps the wrong piece at the wrong time.

I think he's a good coach who will only get better as time goes on, but he was just a bad fit here in the same way IMO all other coaches we've had in the last decade other than Hartley and Sutter were bad fits. Sutter and Hartley were fantastic fits. Hartley's Achilles heel was his system and Sutter's heel was going full GM rather than staying on the bench. Everyone else IMO square pegged round holes.

One of the things I criticized the most was that it was not a style fit with Gully. Gully likes playing a cycle styled game, which our roster is very weak on. It was immediately an attribute that had our roster performing below the sum of its parts at the beginning. The players that struggled the most are the bottom 6 as they had to play a style that was foreign to them at a high pace and learn it on the fly in an NHL setting. That's a recipe for failure. That being said, I think Gully is a good coach with a fantastic coaching mind. He's easily in the top tier for smarts in the league IMO. He's IMO a superior option to Tortz for a cycle styled coach and I think he will be around for a long time. Where he fails is IMO he is on the bleeding edge of systems. He literally had 3 different systems in his two year tenure here. The players were always learning new systems on the fly let alone learning how to play a cycle styled game they were not familiar with. His in game tweaking is weak, but that will come with experience.

The PP and PK being totally abysmal was infuriating and confusing though. How we went from being scary on the PP AND PK to being declawed kittens slinking around on the PP and PK are beyond me.

I wish Gully and co the best. I expect them to land on their feet. Gully is a fantastic person and a smart hockey mind, but he in his current iteration is not the coach that the Flames roster needs right now.