Monday Musings: Does Lou still have his fastball?
GM's decision to fire coach Barry Trotz was, well, curious. Plus, Jon Cooper on all the playoff blowouts so far and Darryl Sutter clearly calling out Johnny Gaudreau
We know that, if he chooses to stay in the game as a coach, Barry Trotz will not be unemployed for long. Hell, the way things are going in this post-season, he might even find work before the first round ends with one of the teams currently in the playoffs. Barry Trotz will be just fine.
We also know that less than 10 months ago, Trotz’s New York Islanders were one shorthanded goal in Game 7 away from advancing to the Stanley Cup final, a final they almost certainly would have won over the Montreal Canadiens. We also know that after winning the Stanley Cup with the Washington Capitals in 2018, Trotz took over the mess that was the Islanders and cleaned things up real good, helping the Islanders go from one of the worst defensive teams in the NHL to one of the best and guiding them to successive appearances in the third round of the playoffs. We know that the Islanders’ season was derailed by the pandemic, that Trotz’s mother died during it and that Trotz’s biggest shortcoming as a coach was that he couldn’t come up with a cure for COVID.
But what we also know is that on the other side of the equation is Lou Lamoriello and Lou doesn’t answer to anybody. For a guy who constantly preaches that nobody is bigger than the team, there’s not a whole lot of accountability going on here. And we also know now that it won’t be long until we find out whether Lamoriello still has his fastball. Because by firing Trotz, Lamoriello has definitely taken the focus away from the team and made it about him. All about him.
What the Islanders do from this point forward will be a referendum on what Lamoriello has done. There’s a very good chance that assistant Lane Lambert will take over the bench. If he does, he’ll inherit a roster that has at least nine players 30 years or older on it, a mind-boggling seven of whom are under contract beyond next season. You can blame the salary cap all you want for what the Islanders have become, but there are a couple of things with that. First, nobody involved in NHL management has a right to complain about a system they asked for in the first place. Second, go ahead and blame the salary cap, but it did not force Lamoriello to trade Devon Toews for draft picks (and now he talks about improving the Islanders defense corps “offensively”), it did not impel Lamoriello to have Zdeno Chara and Andy Greene as everyday defensemen and it did not stunt the development of players such as Oliver Wahlstrom and Kieffer Bellows.
Much of the good the Islanders accomplished in the past couple of years could be directly attributed to Barry Trotz. For reasons he won’t disclose, Lamoriello saw fit to dismiss him because the Islanders need “a new voice” and despite the fact that, “this is in no way anything negative on Barry Trotz.” Lamoriello has created this mess. It will be interesting to see how he tries to clean it up.
BLOWOUTS-A-PLENTY
The NHL might not want to hire Tampa Bay Lightning coach Jon Cooper as a spokesman for any of those video spots they do promoting the Stanley Cup playoffs. Of course, if the league is looking to trump up the parity that it so desperately wants, it might want to stay away from promoting the first round of the playoffs this year anyway. With the exception of Colorado-Nashville, the series have been close. The games themselves have not.
Cooper was asked Monday to explain why so many games in the first round, which is usually the tightest, most competitive round in the playoffs, have been blowouts that have been decided before most people even get comfortable in their Barcaloungers. “Usually there are a plethora of overtime games and everything is a nail biter,” Cooper said, “But these things seem to be decided…in the first period you could turn it off. Which is somewhat unfortunate and somewhat unexpected, especially in our conference where all eight teams, for the first time, had over 100 points. So you’d think there would be a little difference to this.”
For his part, Cooper was completely at a loss for why this is happening. “In a sport that has the greatest two months of playoff action that any sport can deliver,” Cooper said, “this has probably been one of the more underwhelming playoffs we’ve seen.”
That noise you currently hear is NHL commissioner Gary Bettman raging from his office at the NHL headquarters in downtown Manhattan.
CALLING (OUT) JOHNNY GAUDREAU
Did anyone else notice the subtext in one of Darryl Sutter’s comments on the off day between Games 3 and 4 of the Calgary Flames-Dallas Stars series? When asked about the fact that his team has had such trouble scoring goals in this series, Sutter threw out this nugget to media covering the series: “I’d rather have a guy who scores a big goal than a guy who scores 40.”
Any guess as to how many goals Johnny Gaudreau scored this past season? Try 40, on the nose. And then consider that Sutter doesn’t say anything, even good morning, without trying to send a message. As Toronto Maple Leaf fans fret over the fact that players such as Auston Matthews and William Nylander have gone missing in action at times in their series against the Tampa Bay Lightning, consider that Gaudreau, Matthew Tkachuk and Andrew Mangiapane have combined for exactly zero goals so far against Dallas.
It’s not as though Gaudreau hasn’t been getting some looks. Since Game 1, he has had seven shots and 11 additional shot attempts in two games and had a chance to tie Game 3 with a late breakaway on which he failed to score. When asked if he had any words for Gaudreau, Sutter once again put the onus on the player. “I’m not on the ice with him,” Sutter said. “I’m not going to take the shot for him. Guy’s got a breakaway. That’s his job. He’s one of the best players in the league. There’s no cutting around it or hiding it, you’ve got to be that.”
It will be interesting to see how Gaudreau responds in Game 4. What will be equally interesting is whether Gaudreau takes his coach’s comments into consideration when he decides what to do when he becomes an unrestricted free agent in July.
Tampa and TO is exactly what I expected. I would have been shocked if the games were low scoring, but one of them may decide to lock it down in a game 6 or 7 if we get there.