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GDT #45: JAN 8 7:30, Jets @ Leafs

Props to Papi:

The goals were the 30th and 31st of the season for Matthews — making him the first U.S.-born player in NHL history to hit the 30-goal mark in four straight years to start his career.
 
I thought our effort was there today. I just didn’t think we did a good enough job of generating offense or putting the puck in good spots for us to generate offense. I thought we spent a lot of time trying to retrieve pucks and forecheck and that kind of stuff. They did a good job retrieving and breaking it out. As a result, we didn’t get much offense going.

Relieved to see Keefe say this. They've been dumping pucks in too much lately. Not by design, evidently.

Also glad to see he's no fan of the SO or the 3 on 3 OT:
The shootout is a tough one. It’s not fun. Overtime and shootout are really toss ups. It can go either way. Overtime being what it is, you can dominate in overtime and you make one mistake and it is the breakaway the other way, or you can be getting dominated and get a breakaway the other way. Once you get past regulation, all bets are off for the most part.

I know 3 on 3 is wild fun but it's almost pure luck of possession off the draw, etc..

 


In the 11gms since that 14min "benching" game:

11gms, 21:33, 12gls, 20pts

The hilarious thing is Mike Babcock gave an interview 2 weeks before being fired where he claimed he stays up all night thinking of ways to fix the Leafs.
I cannot ever explain what he was thinking or his reasoning.
Forget about the stupid "Stories" about him, he should never work again given his coaching performance on this team. Not enough is being made out of what a horrific job he did.
And he was the highest paid coach in history...
 
The hilarious thing is Mike Babcock gave an interview 2 weeks before being fired where he claimed he stays up all night thinking of ways to fix the Leafs.
I cannot ever explain what he was thinking or his reasoning.
Forget about the stupid "Stories" about him, he should never work again given his coaching performance on this team. Not enough is being made out of what a horrific job he did.
And he was the highest paid coach in history...

Still dont care about any of those "motivational" stories.

My issues with him were always and will always be with his on-ice strategies and personnel decisions. They were horrific.
 
Still dont care about any of those "motivational" stories.

My issues with him were always and will always be with his on-ice strategies and personnel decisions. They were horrific.


In a way, Babcock is almost lucky that so much of the focus has been on his off-ice behaviour and character in the wake of getting fired. It's taken a lot of the focus away from his brutal roster deployment and on-ice tactics.

He can always come back in the future and claim to have worked on himself and changed. But the way he managed this roster and the systems he had them playing cuts straight to the core of how good or bad he is as a head coach, and that's a lot harder to hand-wave away.
 
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