News Article: Kovacevic: No excuses for Crosby, Malkin

[canadianguy77]

I haven't taken Kovacevic seriously in about 10 years or so. I remember his articles and Q/A's with the PPG were pretty decent, and at times he could be quite hard on the organization. This article was absolute garbage.

 

[SHOOTANDSCORE]

What is barb? ....

Good question.

 

[ilovealistair]

I'm not going to place all the blame on Sid and Geno. Yes they are payed to score goals but when they are both 9s and the rest of the teams are 1-4s, they don't have a lot to work with. I don't care if they're the best 2 players in the world, they can't carry the team all the time. Slumps happen, I understand that. More importantly, they are players, they can only do what the coaches say. If the coach refuses to fix the line and get out coached line HCDB always does in the playoffs, then I refuse to place blame on them.

 

[Sypher04]

Too much is made of Crosby and Malkin not scoring. Neither one has played poorly this playoffs at all. We simply aren't a well built team for playoff hockey and until that changes, as well as a change in coaching (probably) I can't see us winning. I would love nothing more than to be proven wrong though.

When we won the cup, we had depth, but we've lost Jordan Staal, Maxime Talbot, Petr Sykora, Miroslav Satan, Bill Guerin, Ruslan Fedotenko, Tyler Kennedy, Matt Cooke, Hal Gill, Mark Eaton, Sergei Gonchar, Alex Goligoski.

On their own, most of these losses don't move the needle much, but I really feel that Staal, Talbot and Cooke were significant blows to the this team. Staal and Cooke from a 3rd line, and defensive standpoint. And Talbot for just a locker room presence and support for Fleury. Kunitz was younger, Dupuis wasn't injured.

We are not such a mess than it can't be fixed, we just need the right mixture of players to be put in place.