 RDOilerfan
Messages: 3908
Registered: January 2016
3 Cups
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| Adam wrote on Wed, 28 February 2024 10:52 |
| RDOilerfan wrote on Wed, 28 February 2024 10:33 |
Scoring titles don't mean anything to the success of the team. McD has lots of scoring titles. I'd like him to focus on playing a much better overall game. When he plays a complete game, the team follows.
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This is another old hockey trope. Individual stats don't matter...
Except, they do. Having the best player scoring at almost unprecedented rates helps us win games along with cementing his legacy.
There's a mythology that guys like Yzerman and Modano were created by their coaches, who got them to forget about scoring points and focus on playing a "200-foot game". It's bull. They were phenomenal players who were always good at the game. It's not like they were hovering around the centre line looking for long passes. They got stronger as they got older, and so were probably better able to take the puck off opposing players. But it's just a jackass coach move as old as time to try to take credit for your players' success and we saw it in both those cases.
Somehow, it never seemed to hurt Gretzky or Lemieux or Orr to just be great players who scored a ton of points and won a bunch of Art Ross Trophies. It also isn't a sign that McDavid is being selfish or defensively lazy if he scores a boatload of points down the stretch, wins the Art Ross and has over 100 assists.
I do think it's interesting that our crappy media guys are always willing to go after guys like McDavid, Draisaitl and Bouchard for getting points while not even thinking about talking about the one guy who IS consistently defensively lazy on the team in Evander Kane...
Did anyone see that himbo Rishaug trying to defend himself on twitter for asking stupid questions to Ekholm about Bouchard the other day?
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You realize when you come at me with the first thing out of your mouth accusing me of being stuck in the past, that's an insult right? You tell me not to take things personal, then the first thing out of your mouth is a personal shot on who I am.
My entire point was for the player to not focus so much on trying to score that he plays reckless and completely abandons all team structure defensively. If there are opportunities to go for offense that doesn't put your team into terrible situations defensively, then of course you take them but aplayer shouldn't be cheating for offense so much that it puts the team into a bad spot because you aren't doing your responsibilities or doing low percentage plays that put your team in trouble.
My 10 yr olds AA coach teaches the kids you can't just be all about offense and completely abandon defense. When a dman rushed the puck into the Ozone, a forward has to drop back to cover for him, not all forward follow the dman as an example. I don't see how that's out dated hockey thoughts. That's just playing smart hockey.
[Updated on: Wed, 28 February 2024 12:02]
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