It always cracks me up when people make excuses for the coach based on large swaths of players not playing well. Is that not a huge part of the coaching position? To incentivize, motivate, and ultimately get players to perform up their abilities and beyond?
...where did I make any excuses for anyone? I was responding to the posts putting our crappy start down to Varly being hurt and our defense. It's the top 6 and offense who's failure is at the heart of our struggles, not the defense. Landeskog is looking worse than he did when he came back after Stuart had scrambled his brains, and I don't think ROR has ever played this poorly for the Avs, even as a 20 point rookie bottom 6er.
None of these are excuses, just the current state/problems of the avs.
With the way Landy's struggling to stay on his skates, or impose himself in puck battles that he used to win with ease; I wouldn't be shocked if he's playing through an injury that's making him this much slower and sapping his power. But that still wouldn't be an excuse cause if landy's so impeded by injury that he's playing this badly Patrick should make him sit until he heals, even though he's the captain and we're being battered by injuries to what depth we have in a season fast becoming a lost cause RE: the postseason.
And who the **** knows what's wrong with ROR. He's been simply off in almost every way, even over the past 10 games were he's at least doing some ROR things again. His touch is gone this season, and he's not nearly as sharp against the puck or in puck battles as we're used to him being. So maybe his mind's already moved on to a new team, maybe he's pissed off at Joe and Patrick for how the negotiations went, maybe he's too focused on figuring out how to make an extension/trade happen, maybe that process is forcing himself to push away from his super-involved crazy-life-coach dad, or maybe it's one of a hundred other things. I'm very curious to see what comes with him because that should be something patrick can either work ROR through, or something that should've convinced Patrick to trade him. So if you want to place blame here to I think Patrick could probably be being more effective.
But those two players' current form is the only part of our top 6 I think Patrick Roy could hold a significant part of the blame for, but since you brought up who's "fault" our offensive failures are; at some point it's players who have to make plays and blaming the coaches for good and potentially excellent players just not playing well gets you no where. Two players of Landy and ROR's caliber playing as god-awfully as they have been has to fall on them to. And if those two were playing like themselves we wouldn't be in the bottom 10 for goal scoring.
Iginla and Tanguay have been fine, Iginla doing reasonably well even though he can no longer drive the play for his line if his linemates aren't doing it and so has to be the third man. A plan that's not had great result given how awfully landy's been playing and MacK not using cheatcodes as often this year. Meanwhile Tanguay's blown away any reasonable expectations since game 5 and been our best forward since Duchene's funk started. So the oldies are not the problem and if you really want to attribute form solely to coaching he should get kudos for the way tanguay's looking like he was ten years younger.
Mack's a child who's learning to play as a top 6 Center after having been eased in on the third line and the wing last year. Which you can blame patrick for but was going to happen at some point, so might as well be this year when we're still waiting to finish setting our defense up, the rest of the core is also still developing, and Stastny walked to force our hand on the matter. This was expected and so some offensive slow down was obviously going to come, but MacK isn't the reason we've dropped from 4th to 20th in goals/game.
Meanwhile Duchene is doing exactly what he so often does when we start ******** the bed; trying too hard and getting himself even more frustrated. Despite having been our best forward for the first 12-15 games until Landy and MacK got put on his wings and their struggles rubbed off on him. He did manage to get MacK going a little bit during that time, but Landy's still looking bad and Duchene's own recent struggles don't help.
So Duchene's struggles fall on Roy to some extent to, but MacK's don't. That is just a child developing. Duchene though, like Landy and ROR, should be mature and experienced enough not to let himself play this poorly despite everything that's gone wrong around him; and Patty needs to find a way to fix that. Get Duchene, Landeskog and ROR back to form and this team will at least get back into the playoff race, even if it is on the periphery. That has to come from both the coach and the players.