Keep him in. His penalty was kind dumb to take, but the players responded to it. It energized the crowd and the team. I don't mind the short bench with the quality of forwards we have. Dzingel was doing alright but wasn't setting the world on fire.
Ideally, Glass tries to match Neil's aggressiveness in an elimination game and has a meltdown or Neil gets him to take a dumb penalty. If Glass comes out, Neil can too. Boucher made a good adjustment that the late 90's Senators never would have.
While I agree with most of your post I completely disagree that the penalty was dumb, in fact, I would argue the exact opposite that the penalty was exactly what the team needed to motivate them. Who gives a crap that they lost the PP, there PP sucks anyway, he probably did them a favour not giving them a PP given they were scored twice against in one PP the last game. They do better 5 on 5 than they do on the PP & lots of times it kills their momentum. What they needed was motivation not a PP & that is exactly what Neil gave his team, gave the crowd & gave all Sens fans everywhere & it made all the difference for his teammates to come back with a win. Do you think Phaneuf thought it was a bad penalty? He deserves all the credit he gets.
Really weird to hear people and radio personalities say Neil was essentially the reason we won game 5. Why are people so willing to disconnect themselves from reality in 2017? Present someone with a fact and its FAKE NEWS or biased. I was all for Neil playing that game and I was stoked to see Glass get his face punched but at the end of the day Neil played 3 minutes and negated a PP. That's all he did. To overstate his performance is a massive discredit to the guys who actually did have to battle in that game and put points on the board. He should definitely not play in an elimination game where the shenanigans will be non existent and Boucher doesn't have the luxury of last change.
Really weird to read what you wrote here. Why are you so willing to disconnect yourself from the reality that Neil brought so much emotion to the game & gave his teammates a huge boost of courage. You can't measure it with Corsi, it doesn't show up on the game sheet but it's clearly obvious from everyone of his teammates, the coaching staff, the media & the fans & there was nothing fake about it.
People on here continuously ***** about how Ottawa crowds are so quiet & don't cheer & don't sellout & here we have a moment where the crowd went nuts when Neil stepped on the ice, how could anyone ignore that? They were pumped, the players got pumped, all Sens fans watching got pumped & they played so much better afterwards, you can't deny that. Are you unaware of emotions in games & confidence? It's absolutely not a discredit to the players on the ice & in fact, I would argue they responded to the sacrifice Neil made for them, it picked them UP. You could look at things through any lens & some people take it negatively & some take it positively, I take your comments as a glass half empty. The response by the team & the fans says it all to me & Neil had a huge part in that IMO. It's not fake news, your comments could be taken as blind ignorance. Comments like yours ... are best left un-said, it just puts a damper on a game where one would think every Sen fan should be happy about.
I think the post game comments from a number of Senators, including Turris, demonstrate the impact he had on the game. Certainly to fans looking only at the box score his impact does not seem as pronounced. But I for one choose to take the accolades his coach and team mates showered him with at face value and believe that Chris Neil had a significant impact on Saturday's game.
