I like Comrie and am hoping for him but at some point he needs to produce better results.
I don't think anyone disagrees with this. I still maintain that his numbers where do to fatigue and being asked to do too much by a coach who had no faith in Phillips.
Comrie's low save percentage is predominantly driven by a 7 straight game stretch in early March that saw him post an .831 save percentage over that time frame. Kind of looks out of place doesn't it? So the question then becomes why did Comrie go ice cold for such am extended stretch when up until that point he had a much more even keeled distribution between performances.
Well the 20 day stretch that immediately predated that cold spell had Comrie play 10 games with 4 consecutive B2B situations with a 3 in 4 game stretch at the beginning of the start of the B2B stretch. To me that is an absolutely ridiculous work load and imo directly tied into the cold stretch.
It's completely fine to be apprehensive with Comrie but sometimes I think we need to look beyond the overall number and try to find legitimate reasons for unexpected performances. I'd say smart coaching by Vincent would have lead to Phillips being in for two of those b2b situations which would have allowed Comrie to not get played into the ground. There is zero time to recharge physically and mentally when you play a full game every second day for nearly a month.
Edit: we also see this type of defense with other players like Petan and Dano who's box car stats look terrible but then you look deeper and realize that some of it is due to not being utilized properly or being put in a place to really succeed. As Garret posted in another thread about over training proper recovery time is equally if not more so important and id argue that Vincent didn't place Comrie in place to succeed by giving him the time he needed between starts to properly recover during the stretch I mentioned. At the end of the day Comrie still needs to up his consistency but I maintain his year last year was much better than then the end result indicated.