OkimLom
Registered User
- May 3, 2010
- 15,271
- 6,753
I don’t think Mitts played well at all but I’m not concerned about it yet. I also look at the entire forward group pretty much struggling to do anything. Krueger mentioned how Columbus’s size was something they struggled with. Most posters saw that with the comments about how slow and small we looked last night. You can come up with a game play to attack it tactically but they aren’t doing that yet.
I will say the one repeatable thing from this game that concerns me with Mitts is face offs. He was demolished. Thats something I hope he works on and it may be better against other teams.
It's more of a "put a pin in it" kind of situation. Just know there were these issues. How does Casey respond? How does he look in responding? These first two games, it was more assessing how the players came into camp more than how they are gelling as a team. I wouldn't care of Mitts and Sam got caved in where they allowed 5 goals together. How they look as players in terms of conditioning, strength, that is what my "goal" is these first couple of games. I knew Columbus had the better lineup, so the issues of the team not being able to create offense and the numbers from that, isn't too much of a worry for me. We will get to that point in the preseason that you want to results due to improvement, but for me, at this time it's not. The 1st 2 games didn't matter to me with the results. The way they came into this season did.
The reason why I'm a little tougher on Mittelstadt, and some might say unfairly, is because of how obviously out of game shape, and poorly conditioned he was last year, especially during the preseason and camp. There were question marks about his strength, about his offseason workout. There were articles written just recently about how he focused on it. I even said in one of the threads, (in the Casey thread) , that how well he did this offseason in the context of his workouts, will come to ahead in camp:
From August 14th:
We don't know what or what he isn't doing this offseason. We do know that if he's not doing enough in the offseason, that it will show during camp.
Well, it's camp and we are into the preseason and he doesn't look that good with his conditioning or his strength in his first game. Now, of course, this is only one game, and there's plenty of time to see improvement in that matter, but for a guy who was publicly questioned on this matter, he should've made a more concerted effort to make sure he would shut up his critics. IMO, it's not a good look.
You look at Tage Thompson, and you heard him say he tweaked his diet, and he looked a lot more energized and more engaged. He also looks more conditioned. He looks stronger as well.
Here's hoping Casey brings it next game and shows that he's in better shape than he looked vs Columbus.