The point is any decision to play Ritchie or Nichushkin or whichever spare is a tiny sliver in the grand scheme of what the coach is responsible for doing in a particular hockey game, and that in itself is a tiny sliver of an entire season. It's an absolutely trivial reason to significantly impact your evaluation of a coach's season.
Sure ok
Defense was great all year, Bowness gets an A
Goaltending was great all year, Reese gets an A
The NHL team was hot and cold, trading winning streaks for losing streaks all damn year, limped into the PO, and somehow scored less goals than an offensive starved Hitchcock coached team the previous year, that had Kari f***ingLehtonen as a backup goalie playing 30games, and finished despite a better overall roster, 1 whole point better.
I wouldn't give Hitchcock a high grade for the previous year, Monty doesn't get one because the team finished with 93p (instead of 92) and went 7-6 in the PO.
The year was a success with where they finished, but it was a lateral coaching change. The difference of course being Monty has years to potentially tweak things and get better while Hitchcock is for a completely different generation of hockey.
Maybe a quality coach would make a decision to not play a player who actively hurts the team every time he plays, regardless if it actually cost the team on the scoreboard in the end. You don't have to count it against him if you don't want, that's your prerogative. Calling it trivial is a gross misstatement.
He's a bad player, that cannot be trusted to do anything but take penalties, actively putting him into the lineup, shows a complete lack of common sense.
If you're making a lineup change and putting in a player who makes the team worse (literally not objectively), for the most important game of the year, you have some major flaws, especially knowing you can't have said skating liability on the ice for more than 5mins a game and you know for 100% certainty that he's going to cost you at least 2mins with a dumb penalty.
Yet without failure, he rolls out Ritchie and (liability # 2) Spezza for game 7.
Definitely deserves some high praise because the goalies stood on their heads and the defense played great (Bowness).
I mean he couldn't get them to start, but what 3-4 games, well out of 95 they played. But i'm sure that's not his job either
His game 7 coaching plan was to get steamrolled for 50minutes straight and some how have the team hang on, get to OT before getting them ready to play, but you know just a small sliver ofbut yes he definitely deserves high praise for all his great "coaching" decisions.
