The bolded part of your comment needs to be highlighted as an example of what I mean when I say it's "political." Because the whole premise is based on the notion that our defense has improved by adding Barrie and Ceci to the mix, and job well done Dubas.
The only one to have brought up Ceci or Barrie or Dubas here is you, so that's a weird claim. Our defense has seen significant improvement despite massive injuries. There is nothing about that statement that is incorrect or "political", and it's not only about Ceci/Barrie/Dubas.
In theory, we balanced the D pairs, added two skilled players who upgraded the skating and transition game, let's us play less in our own zone and all good. It's an elegant design! But as we saw with how the season played out there was quite a gap between those expectations and the way things really happened on the ice.
No, there wasn't much of a gap. The only time there is a gap between expectations (especially when including the context of injuries) and what really happened is when you look at a stat like GA that includes the play of
TWO positions, and attribute it primarily to the position that has less impact on it, while ignoring all evidence that says otherwise. But that's not an issue with the stats. The an issue with using the GA stat incorrectly.
At the end of the day, it's much easier to assign blame to Andersen (who deserves it) and Hutchinson (since banished) than looking under the hood to see if there are bigger design problems with why the goaltending is so bad.
Actually, as you can see by this and every other thread in this forum, it's quite hard to assign blame to the goaltending, even when it's the beyond obvious rightful target. Lots of pushback. Mistakes happen all of the time in hockey, and they are brushed off as nothing, but if there is any remote trace of a mistake happening at some period of time before a goal, chances are that in the minds of most hockey fans, the goalie will be absolved and the defense will be blamed. Every motion and decision gets micro-analyzed and played on repeat. People tend not to understand or don't want to accept how much impact a goaltender has individually on team results.
Nobody here is against "looking under the hood" to see where the issues really lie. In fact, that's exactly what many of us have done, but the overwhelmingly obvious answer is that the issue mainly lies in our goaltending playing bad this year. I'm not sure why some can't accept that and there has to be some huge convoluted reason. Goaltending fluctuates a lot. That's the nature of the sport.
Cause let's face it, we don't have a lot money moving forward to fix those looming problems.
What looming problems would that be?
And like you said, you don't want to think there are deeper structural problems, so you spend your analytical energy trying to downplay them. At the end of the day, it's "political."
No. At the end of the day, there aren't massive structural problems, so I spend time explaining the facts and data to people who wish to push media narratives. The only ones making it "political" are those willfully ignoring and dismissing the best information we have to make evaluations.
