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Well, actually we need more than a couple of guys to work the corners. We need all 3 guys on each line willing to go to work. Tarasenko and Kane were interesting adds at the deadline, but both of them had the habit of ruining shifts because they were often the last dog to the fight.
Kane just wouldn't really engage in the corners. He played like he was afraid of having his career ended by one hit.
Tarasenko, while a freakin ox, was often slow to his spots. He has a lot of disappearing in his game where tries to disappear in the o zone and suddenly find himself open in the slot for a shot. That's great, but you gotta get to the right spots to help retrieve the puck. Finally, as much as I love Zibby and Kreids, that duo has a habit of pulling the puck off the walls too quickly and forcing passes into the slot. They're a far better 5v5 unit when they retrieve pucks and go low to high. But they have bad habits. Same with Panarin. And don't get me started on how different a game Tro and Panarin play. They aren't great at puck support as a duo because Tro is going mach 10 into the corners and Panarin is 30-40 feet away, hanging out along the boards above the circles. We were a bad 5v5 team because we have players who don't have the will, physicality or fortitude to play a winning brand of hockey at even strength. It's really that simple.
What the team really needs is to find a top 6 player who can lead by example and drag the team into the physical battles and the game. Could that be Othmann one day? maybe but i mean that's years away.
Can Kakko turn into an SOB? Maybe, I finally saw signs in the playoffs of him getting angrier.
But we desperately need a guy who isn't Kreider, Panarin and Zibby to lead and change the identity of the team.
Coaching issues? yes.
But actually I think we have a bigger issue in our team construction. Every time we talk about coaching changes, I keep thinking what system or style would fit best for this team and that the best fit style-wise for this current group is really not a winning brand of hockey. And no coach is great at it, because it's pond hockey. A wizard with X's and O's isn't going to fix this crew in the playoffs. Maybe regular season. We need to win battles 5v5 in the playoffs. Right now, we have a team built for the regular season. It's like a team of Mattieu Schneiders.
I agree with 95% of this.
Tarasenko was willing to go into the corners and do the work, the problem was he was often alone and the Rangers' system under Gallant is such that when the puck is contested in the offensive zone along the wall, one player has to win a puck battle by himself (often against two defenders) and the other two forwards position themselves on both sides of that player along the wall as a "chip" option which of course even if the player does win the battle results in immediately another contested puck. That's the reason offense off the cycle always seemed like it had to come with shots from the point - because those were the only guys open that didn't immediately find themselves under pressure when the puck was moved to them. The other thing about Tarasenko was that he was much more responsible with line changes than most of the people on this team, which often led to him being the only forward to change and the Rangers getting pinned in their own end after with mishmash lines because Tarasenko was the only forward who changed. Certainly didn't help.
We don't put someone in a scoring area on the forecheck like most teams do (teams that keep the third forward off the wall in a small triangle configuration on the strong side of the ice), nor do we put a forward behind the net on the cycle and opportunistically move him around to scoring areas based on where the puck is going. Instead, if the puck's in the corner, it's consistently one forward in the corner battling 1v2, 1 behind the net, one forward at the strong side half wall. It's hard to create off the forecheck like that unless you have a massive size advantage or are playing a demoralized team that stopped giving a crap.
Kane I 1000% agree with. He played like he was scared of board battles, and instead of sheltering him and letting him play on a line with Kreider and Trocheck where they did the bulk of the dirty work, they forced Zibanejad on that line instead of leaning into offense by putting 93 with 10 and 91.
I loved the aggressive, trolling side of Kakko we saw in the playoffs. If he can play like that, get a bit stronger, and add a little bit of speed, we really might see something from him someday.
I do, however, think that change has to start somewhere and that coaching is the way. We've never have a coach known for developing offense that I can remember in the last 30+ years of watching hockey. It's always been defensive coaches, coaches with no identity, or "offensive" coaches who just happened to luck into top flight talent earlier in their career (aka Vigneault) and got a favorable reputation but whose offensive system was basically, "I'm a players' coach"
My favorite part of your post, however, was the part about Panarin and Trocheck. They simply don't/won't work together, and a good coach would have realized this by the first week of November and never tried them together ever again. Instead, GG tried to force feed that anemic duo all the way through Game 7 of the playoffs, and whenever they were split up, that duo was one of the first ones he "reunited" as part of his "I didn't like what I saw" mid-game line changes.
