I've been done with this coach for a while and as for anyone else; I don't know how you couldn't feel the same after watching his performance post-deadline.
Quite frankly, his two biggest weaknesses as a coach are two of his inherently fundamental tasks, zone starts/match-ups and setting his line-up. You can't make it as a coach if you're setting up your team for failure before play is started.
Even with the team turnover, short training camp; it shouldn't take a team half the year to find lines that work. Only to be STILL tweaking them in the last days of the season. UNACCEPTABLE.
His GM went out and made what would be a huge splash for any team. He's got that player playing on the 3rd line with two players who have played as bad as any over the course of the year. One who most can't remember the last time he had a strong, full season. Seems reasonable.
He's absolutely ran Backstrom into the ground. In a season such as this, there's no reason to be playing a goaltender at Backstrom's age and injury history at the pace he has. Playoff positioning, young other goaltending options or not. At this point, he's now got no choice to continue to go to him.
He's also handled the defensive corps about as poorly as possible. Weak personnel or not. Falk or Prosser have never played as poorly as Clark has; a player who was literally picked up off the street mid-season. Why he's been playing of late makes little to no sense.
As far as systems, it is what it is. Talent or not, you're not going to score at any kind of acceptable rate over the course of a year if your fundamental focus revolves around the 3 forwards working along the boards with minimal movement to the front of the net. All talent and creativity has effectively been squashed for a grinder mentality in the offensive zone. Pretty easy for goaltenders to take and save a high volume of shots that are from in tight, from poor angles in an effort to drive from down low towards the net. Very seldomly do we see, both, a player get to a soft area AND shoot the puck with a purpose. When your offensive approach looks like below in most stages of possession in the offensive zone, you're not going to be productive.
Which comes down to exactly how Yeo is and will be grooming the kids. A big part of this franchise. Put simply, he's not comfortable with them because he's not giving them leeway to be creative. The moment they have a rough shift, they don't see the ice for another 10 minutes. Can't build confidence like that in a vital stage of development in a league the organization ultimately wants to get them at. The goal can't be to fill a line-up top to bottom with players that will do nothing but fill in along the boards and not do what it takes to get to scoring areas. Or to create off a rush.
In short, barring an unforeseen run, I don't know how you go into next season with Yeo at the helm.
