What I was getting at is the premise that coaching was a huge flaw. The Bruins under Cassidy have been one of the better teams in the league, and that's after there was a question on how we'd do "post-Claude". I thought Colt's assessment of "one playoff series in five years" as disingenuous. They've played, 3 playoffs under Cassidy, right? First year we lose in the first round against Ottawa, who goes on a great run, and got some pretty favorable reffing--and that's after him taking over for the last 3rd of the year. Next year we lose in the 2nd round to a pretty stacked Tampa team, and that too, wasn't as one-sided as the 4-1 series loss would lead you to believe when you consider the horrible non-call on Kucherov tripping McAvoy, as well as having to use something like the 10th-12th defensemen on the depth chart due to injuries. Which brings us to this year, where we've made at least the second round, and maybe we get past that hurdle.
Wouldn't the major praise you mentioned point to where he's a good coach, not a bad one? He recognized adjustments that he needed to make and made some. We got a lot of heavy forecheck in game 2, and it was great, but after the game all you heard was how the Bruins got away with murder and that the next game was going to get called a lot tighter. There was a perception that if the Bruins played the same type of game again that they'd be a parade of Bruins going to the penalty box. As it turned out, they lost the game by playing to conservatively, so in hindsight it's easy to say they should have just kept slamming the Leafs around and took their chance to see if the refs would have catered to the Leafs (media and fans') whining. But ultimately, what he ended up doing worked--and that's with two of his superstars struggling offensively (and one both offensively and defensively).
So, with that, I'll bow out of the discussion as I think it's pretty clear on which side of the coaching fence I stand on