It’s funny… I really do believe they CAN make the playoffs. I don’t know if they have the WILL to do it.So far everytime they get close to the cliff of success, they have basically backed away. The roster is not laden w/ the best of talent for sure but like most great efforts the sum is greater than its parts and can seriously produce something special.I am afraid to get my hopes up too much. They have given so much more than they were supposed to already and expecting too much more seems so unfair but dammittt! They’ve gone and given me high expectations!
What we are missing is consistency. Without it we are too often lucky rather than good and steal games or run into good teams having bad days at just the right time or even worse, our biggest competition runs into a hot goalie at just the right time.
A GPG player would make this team a serious contender rather than an insistent challenger. There have been so many nights when 1 goal could have made a difference for us. (imagine all of our 1 point regulation losses being ties and having those loser points added to our totals!… ANA parlayed that same thing into a cup run last season). Our scoring committee can put up enough ’secondary’ scoring to get us by but we really need that duo (think getz/perry or zets/dats) that can consistently be counted on to lead the committee. Doan *when healthy*/Mueller or Rhino *man if he had just one ounce more talent* /Vrbata is as close as we have come to our own duo and they are all pretty streaky.
I don’t know if they have the experience to knuckle down and grind to a play off berth. But that is basically what it will take. The slow starts and broken efforts at 60 minute games kill us… which is too bad since we have shown that we can out do nearly every team when we are focused. 1 or 2 hot periods per game just won’t get it done at this time of the season and certainly won’t get far in the actual playoffs. And we clearly can’t expect to win when giving opponents 12 to 18 sogs vs our measily 5 or 7, our goalies have definitely made grand theft of games an art form lately.
Replacing the (invisible for 18 games at a time guys) and the (defensively responsible but offensively challenged) players like York, Ziggy and *sorry to say it* Shoe for players with more consistent production next season… ala McLean/Porter will definitely propel us into the next level. Getting our resident wild child(Carci) and the grand old man of the old style NHL (Boynk) to stay out of the box would really help too.
With Breezy/Telly next season getting that hot start rather than the 50/50 jumping bean start on 07 will make a difference also. (think about where we’d be right now if we had won even 2 or 3 of the 7-7-0 games we played b4 Bryz! dropped into our laps).
I guess I still have meagre hope and I still believe but the boys will have to seriously get it together or we will soon have threads that consist of planning and scheming for 08 and speculating on the draft while they sit around picking out their golf clothes for days spent on the greens rather than the ice.
