As the playoffs of the National Hockey League continue, and the teams are playing to raise the venerable Stanley Cup, the iconic Montreal Canadiens are planning next season.
The team with most of the Stanley Cup championships in the history of the NHL - 24 - Montreal did not even claim the playoffs in what was a disaster of the 2017-2018 season for the Canadiens.
As fans in Montreal are surprised that it did not go so late with their favorite team, just like the supporters of Canadiens in Sault Ste. Marie - including the self-proclaimed no. 1 fanatic Habs, the legend of local radio Lou Turco.
It's been a while since Montreal won its last Stanley Cup.
It would have been in 1993, when the Canadiens, supported by the goal of the play-off of the most valuable player Patrick Roy, won three overtime games to drive out the "Los Angeles Kings" in the Stanley Cup finals.
Since then, thanks to a number of coaching and management changes, the Canadiens have mostly fled from scratch.
What happened to the Montreal Canadiens, Lou Turco?
Even the legendary Lou - he from the gift of gabba - may be really speechless, trying to explain what happened to the Canadiens during the 2017-2018 campaign.
Canadiens scored just 209 goals, which took 29th place in the NHL, while at the same time surrendering 264 goals, which is the fifth largest in the league for the campaign 2017-2018. Only last season, in the campaign for 2016-2017, they allowed 200 goals, which were tied to the third best in the NHL.
Many fans and media representatives point to the lack of a true center number 1 as Canada's most powerful weak spot, and this is a legitimate criticism. But it was also a question last season, in the season before, and ... well, you understood the idea.
To get a true idea of why the team failed so sorry, we need to go beyond the forwards and learn the role that the game has defended in terms of creating a crime.
The old saw that "The best offense is good defense", especially true in the NHL, but not only from a purely defensive aspect. Most of the goals scored during the game with a constant force begin with the defensive zone, which is why we see an increasingly high level of importance for the defenders of the puck.
Meanwhile defensive defenders - this term is basically a code for blue liners that fight and often clog in their own zone - quickly lose play spaces for more mobile teammates.
Estimating the number of offenses created from the rear, we can look at the transfer received from all the defenders in the team for five years. This season, the Canadiens Argentines had only 59 assists, which contrasted sharply with the results of last season and even more compared to 2015-16 and 2014-2015.
We must bear in mind that the trauma of Shey Weber was a huge factor in the fact that the "blue line" could not create an insult. But even if we add an average Weber career indicator, the grand total, which will bring it to 66, it still lags behind the five-year average of the Canadiens.
And the problems were not just obvious in the offensive zone, since the Canadiens also fought on the defensive.
Last season, during the game with a constant force, they allowed 53 attempts at a shot in 60 minutes, which is one of the best results in the NHL. In this power this season, they allowed 60 attempts of a shot in 60 minutes, placing them in the lower half of the league. They also saw an increase in scoring chances and shots with a high degree of danger, compared with 2016-2017.
However, during the posthumous press conference of the team, Canadiens general manager Mark Bergewin has repeatedly stated that his team lacks the right attitude. If the relationship is not synonymous with talent, it ignores the biggest problem that this team faces, which is part of the list.
Several years the Canadiens crawled "risky" defenders - P.K. Subban, for example, - led to a blueline, which makes more mistakes and causes no violation, and the whole team suffered as a result.
This does not mean that the legal center number 1 would not help. Undoubtedly, this would be a boon for the head coach Claude Juena, but until the Canadiens fixed their blue line, even Edmonton Oilers, star Connor McDavid, could not save this team. It's only Bergevin.
Some players were not met, but, as GM said, they have never been in it since the beginning of the season. And defenders such as Victor Mete (from the London knights of the Ontario hockey league) and Noah Yuulsen, will help, but they are not ready for senior couples.
And in Sault Ste. Marie, fans like the aforementioned Lu Turko, who still wears his jacket in the Canadiens - a dream that one day will win this 25th Stanley Cup.
Comments
Post a Comment