Hoping not to drag the mood down here, but this has been in my head and I want to comment on it:
What bothers me about posts like this - and why I have a tendency to call them out - is that, based on things not going well at a given time, they imply/assert some sort of
intrinsic deficiency with this team and/or its personnel. Something that can only be "fixed" by replacing people. And yet, this evening we had a pretty particularly dramatic demonstration that such a conclusion can be remarkably ill-founded.
I'm not picking on
@The Bread Man specifically here* (we all have moments where we doubt and despair), but this particular "we're intrinsic failures" thing? I would posit that
most of the time this is the wrong conclusion to draw. Players have ups and downs. Teams have ups and downs. Heck, sometimes they go from one to the other in the middle of a game (*cough*cough*two hours ago*cough*). That's not some sort of inherent, intrinsic deficiency - that's life and the human condition. Every team does that. Every team's fans get kvetchy and doubting about their team not being a world-beater.
I accept that this phenomenon exists, but that doesn't mean I'm quietly okay with it. It's something I feel like pushing back on, because it feels just so damned
unnecessary. Are we not here to be entertained? Why find ways like this to be so thoroughly disappointed? And it especially sticks in my craw when such moods are used as rationale for making bigger "corrective" moves later. I mean, okay, yeah, sure, depression and black moods happen to all of us, but making big decisions while depressed/disappointed is like making them while drunk - sure, it seems to all make perfect sense at the time, but outside of that state you'll quickly realize that it doesn't, and you'll really regret acting on it.
If you'll pardon my channeling my inner Yogi Berra for a moment - ultimately, we don't need to be the Greatest Hockey Team That Ever Hockeyed. Ultimately, all we really have to do is be better than the other guy more often than not. Because if you do that enough, and you stay ultimately better than all the other guys that often... by process of elimination, that would make you the best. (Yes, I know hockey players themselves push to be The Best Themselves They Can Be. But we're fans. We're here to be entertained; it's not our paycheck depending on the result.)
I'm not sure where I'm ultimately going with this, outside of making a TL;DR version of "why you heff to be mad". This is supposed to be a fun diversion. Why jump to conclusions about being Intrinsically Doomed based off of momentary fluctuation?
*: Well, okay, I am... just not exclusively.