Posts Tagged ‘Keenan’
“That part of the industry has always bothered me – that you try to find a solution and success by making a coaching change, and often times it does not work,” said Keenan. “Probably more often than not it does not work. But it’s a desperate measure at a desperate time when you feel that something of that magnitude has to happen in order to jump-start your team. It’s a little bit of a gamble by a manager to a certain extent, but the manager has to read the situation as well as he can and rely on his own experience and review the history of the team and what he thinks his chances are, what the results might be.”
Obviously this is coming from a biased person. It is an interesting distinction to make — something Keenan hints at here — that sometimes these changes are made because a manager thinks something major could stir the pot, like the year the Devils fired Ftorek with less than 10 games remaining in the season and went on to win the cup. There are also times when it seems a manager is trying to say “it ain’t my fault.” The Renney situation seems like one of those. The Rangers, for all of the money they have spent, have a very unimpressive roster. The players that are solid, like Lundqvist, are products of the system. It wasn’t all that long ago when Glen Sather pledged to build from within, only to quickly go out and spend money on aging veterans.
I remember when Sather was a frustrated manager for the Edmonton Oilers. He had lost a few key players to free agency and spewed that if he were managing the Rangers (with all of their financial resources) he’d never lose a game. Years in, he still hasn’t won a Cup. Have a look in the mirror, Slats.
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“Everything isn’t traditional with Mike, as you see. He does things a little differently sometimes, which I think has been good for us. We usually know if things are good or bad. Mike loves winning. We all love winning. But he loves it as much as any coach I’ve ever played for.” -Jarome Iginla on Mike Keenan
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The Calgary Flames are mired in their first three-game losting streak of the season following a 5-2 loss to the Chicago Blackhawks last night, and there are certainly reasons to be concerned. Then again, there are reasons not to be as well. Here are three of each.
Concerning:
- All of the theatrics involving Sutter and Keenan did nothing for this club last night, and that is disappointing. They didn’t look dead, but they didn’t look great, either. Worse, the top players were among the worst last night. Regehr was a -2, Iginla a horrendous -4.
- Todd Bertuzzi had become one of the keys to success, and I still think he is. But one of the ways he got there was the elimination of penalties 75-200 feet from his own net. I’ll concede that probably 20-40% of the penalties called on him wouldn’t be called on someone else (both his strength and his reputation make things look worse for him), but he is now putting himself in those positions again. The Flames depend on momentum off of a sustained forecheck, and you simply cannot keep momentum when you are killing penalties.
- Kiprusoff has shown mortality again. While he has made some incredible saves to keep them in games (especially in the Dallas game), he also has let in a few back-breaking stinkers. The one that rolled in over his shoulder from a poor angle last night was the twist of the knife.
Not concerned
- The Dallas game looked like any game with Dallas (either team could have won), and the other two games could have been far different with a break or two early in the game. The Flames are still getting scoring chances, and they have been in this boat before. Perhaps they need another defensive mini-camp to sharpen their skills. They have some two-day breaks in the near future to take another look at this.
- They have positioned themselves well. This is the first three-game losing streak of the season for them, which is impressive for them but also can be taken for this being the worst they’ve played all year. I see it more as the former. They were not even in some games early in the year, and those stretches weren’t necessarily including Dallas and Chicago.
- The GM and coach idenitified this rough patch long before it was critical. Often-times a team waits until it’s been 5 or 6 games. These two guys have short fuses, and you can expect Sutter to make a change or two soon if this isn’t resolved. In fact, Sutter rarely waits right to the deadline to make his moves. I think the next two weeks is the prime time for Darryl Sutter to make small improvements (small is all that fits in the current budget). All of this said, coaches are lying if they say they don’t like a little of this in the middle of a year. Even the best of teams need to remember that they aren’t invincible, and that the hard work has to continue. These little glitches give the coach some credibility back — they make his voice heard again.
It’s a good thing that there are a lot of tough games coming. The worst thing would be to come out and play uninspired against the bottom-feeders. The Flames have several chances to prove they are one of the top teams in the league. Over the next 2-3 weeks, up to the deadline, we’ll find out if their success this season was a mirage, or if we are looking at a true cup contender. I tend to think we’ll be expecting a push toward June.
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They can’t help it. At the very smallest possibility of some descension, the media pounces on it and builds it into something larger than it is. Take Darryl Sutter’s post-game meeting with his club after the Stars loss the other night.
After the media was shuffled out and the doors closed Tuesday night for the discussion, Keenan chose to leave without speaking.
Maybe he didn’t want to say anything that would land him in the same sort of hot water his team was in.
Nevermind the fact that the next paragraph quotes Keenan as saying he welcomes a different voice now and then. This is after Keenan has been praised all year for no explosions reminiscent of his earlier coaching days. Perhaps Sutter, hoping to keep the everyday operations on a somewhat even keel, figured that he could best be the bad cop and not turn things upside down. Keep in mind, they still are one of the top few teams in the last 30-35 games (maybe the best).
I wouldn’t doubt if the whole thing was Keenan’s idea. Still, to assume that Keenan would have any problem with this even after stating that he welcomed the statement from his boss proves that the media is only looking to create something that isn’t there. They tried with the Kiprusoff situation last year, and that failed. They tried to wedge Tanguay between Keenan and management, and they failed (both the team and Tanguay are having much better seasons after parting ways). Apparently this is their next attempt to make news where there isn’t any.
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Flames coach Mike Keenan lacks — how shall we put this — perspective?
His Flames lose a game 4-1 to the Canadiens in Montreal on Tuesday night, a game in which the Canadiens lose Mathieu Dandenault indefinitely with a broken right arm and Christopher Higgins for a while with the proverbial ‘upper-body injury,’ perhaps a shoulder separation.
And what is Keenan doing in the full flush of a disappointing road loss? Complaining about a non-call on Canadiens defenceman Andrei Markov for what appeared to be an incidental knee-on-knee hit on Flames franchise defenceman Dion Phaneuf, who emerged from the loss uninjured?
Does this clown — John Mackinnon — really think that Keenan is going to go out of his way to make a case for the Canadiens guys? I think the point is that this looked like malicious intent, and the other two injuries were an unfortunate occurrence. Whether Phaneuf was injured or not isn’t the point — the point is that they need to crack down on these knee-on-knee hits to make sure that we don’t lose the stars of the game to lengthy injuries. In other words, the fact that Mackinnon doesn’t get it isn’t Keenan’s problem.
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