With Thursday’s disappointing loss to the Detroit Red Wings, the Hurricanes have fallen back to .500 and are trending in the wrong direction with a 3-5-2 record in their last nine games.
Today’s Daily Cup of Joe takes a look back at the team’s summer work and suggests that a couple unfinished projects could be significant in the team’s current struggles.
Hiring Rod Brind’Amour as the head coach
The current down trend offers some support for those who might say that hiring the inexperienced Brind’Amour was a poor decision. No doubt, he is experiencing some growing pains, but I still have a slightly bias for Brind’Amour and am in wait and see mode in general.
But where I think the team missed with regard to Brind’Amour and previously Bill Peters was in not supporting them with more NHL head coaching experience. Though it might have been challenging to land a good former head coach in an assistant’s role to a rookie, I still think the should have found a way to bring in someone else with head coaching experience to support Brind’Amour during challenging times like now.
The missing trade
During the summer, I mapped out a series of moves that I thought made sense for the Hurricanes. The net of those moves included trading Skinner and Faulk. I correctly said that Skinner would be traded for prospects and expected that Faulk would be traded to back fill Skinner’s spot in the lineup. But when a reasonable trade market for Faulk did not emerge, the team decided to keep him. Faulk is playing his best hockey in a few years and has been part of a solid top 4 pairing with Calvin de Haan which is a positive. But the team is also struggling to score goals such that converting Faulk into a scoring forward could be a huge boost for the team right now.
With Faulk off to a strong start, I think the best course of action is to sell high on him in a trade versus deviating from what I believe was the original plan based on a couple months of better play.
What say you Canes fans?
1) Do you agree that both of the items discussed were missteps during the offseason?
2) The team has only played 33 games with Brind’Amour as the head coach, but what is your assessment of him including strengths and weaknesses so far?
3) Do you think the team erred in trading Skinner? Or do you think this this was a necessary move and that the error was just not in adding an additional scorer?
Go Canes!
1. ‘so far the only 2.5 positives from the Canes summer activities were drafting Svech (a stroke of luck), signing Calvin (he has come as advertized) and Mrazek/Mac (you can’t blame last night’s game on Mrazek and the goaltending for the Canes has been a significant improvement on last year).
2. The team record speaks for itself. It’s no better than under Peters. RBA has not had the answers to improve the records or the standing. Whether he can learn on the job and figure it out is anyone’s guess. I’ve considered RBA part of the problem for years and his promotion to the HC a matter of concern. I would have loved to admit I was massively wrong by now and still hope to be in the future, but I wanted to see a new head coach or at least an outsider’s perspective. For all the talk of change, there was massively little change in the coaching/management staff, just downsizing.
3. I know my views on the Skinner trade are probably getting tiresome for everyone, but since you ask:
Why would Skinner be traded?
Let’s look at the primary reasons why a team would trade a player.
His services were not needed. For a team near the bottom of the league in goal scoring, Skinner’s services were very much needed, especially his ability to generate goals regardless of line mates.
The team could not afford to keep him. At 5.75 mill for a perannual 25 goal scorer that is about as cheap as they come and the team is near the salary floor, that is not a reason.
He was going to be a UFA and the return was worth missing out on his contract year of play. The return is a second rounder, a third and a player that has barely cracked the Checkers roster. That return is meager to say the least. There is no way Skinner would not have garnered as much as a playoff deadline trade, many of which fetch a package of a first rounder and a roster player or two (see Rick Nash as one of many recent examples).
We are left with all sorts of BS such as Skinner could never have a plus/minus and he could not develop chemistry (we’ve seen the answer to both).
I am worried the same is going to happen with Faulk. The problem with trading away players who are playing well to maximize the return is that you are inevitably left with the players who are not playing well and picks, how are you going to win? Just look at Hamilton right now. Again, we don[t know everythig and we can pile on the excuses but many of his recent struggles simply come down to lack of effort, nothing more.
I’m not sure those are the reasons for the Skinner trade. Here are the reasons I believe led to the trade.
1. Culture. Dundon openly stated he wanted to change the team culture. He also met with every single player. If Skinner was willing to embrace what Dundon wanted to do he would still be here, IMO.
2. Skinner. Skinner wanted out. He was able to use his no movement clause to force a trade to a team to his liking. He is now close to home in Buffalo. This also significantly effected the return the Canes were able to get for Skinner.
The trade sucked, but unless Dundon was willing to delay the culture change he wanted to make it had to be done. You also see how quickly Dundon pulled the trigger on Lindholm and Hanifin when they balked at his contract proposals? Think Dundon may be a bit impulsive? Starting to think the Canes got fleeced on that deal, especially if they can’t sign Fox.
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1. If the team doesn’t consistently play with intensity – and truly it doesn’t – it doesn’t matter what trade piece could have been acquired during the offseason. This is a team failure going to the top including team leadership, JW and JS, and…
2. RBA. {SMH}. Being an NHL head coach is a difficult job. And if you have never been a head coach at any level (except maybe peewee) you don’t want to have to learn on the job in the NHL. Bringing an experienced head coach in as an assistant is awkward and doomed to failure – who is the de facto head coach providing insight and making the decisions and who is the de facto assistant coach. I am not sure an experienced head coach of value would accept an AC role to a novice HC.
RBA looks in over his head – his comments were like a deer in the headlights. “I know we can play our way because I have seen it” well, coach, make it happen. Motivation, drive, fitness were your strong suits as a development and assistant coach – the team is not playing with motivation or drive. Nor are the Xs and Os very good.
We are losing this season at least in part, and maybe a large part, because of RBA’s learning curve – and really I am not seeing a lot of learning so far.
3. Skinner and a few other names were identified as part of a culture problem last spring. If the owner made that decision, it was RBA (and BP to a degree) who had his ear on hockey matters. If RBA wanted Skinner to stay, even if only through the trade deadline, than Skinner would have stayed. Repeat my last sentence as many times as you need to understand it.
And the error wasn’t that we didn’t bring in a scorer – it wouldn’t matter who we brought in if the team doesn’t play with intensity shift in and shift out, night in and night out.
The team’s results and stats should come as no surprise given our roster and the off-season moves. Compared to last year our defense has significantly improved but our goal scoring (which was already weak last year) has declined. I can’t pin our mediocrity on RBA. To me this is not complicated but is like last year where we just don’t have the right forward group and not enough skilled forwards (hence TD’s recent comment in frustration about how he will never draft a D-man in the first round). This is our achilles heel however O/M has been trying to rectify but for whatever reasons have not been able to pull off a deal.
Well said. This may be why the team has difficulty doing what it takes night in, night out, year after year. They probably see the same thing see, that management did not exactly complete their offseason wish list and the players likely put more pressure on themselves to make up for the lack of moves. This may be why players come here and dry up.
Yes, we landed Ferland and Hamilton…but we didn’t land Skinner’s replacement and that hurts the bottom line, players likely feel this.
Matt believes that we should have brought in a man who has experience as an NHL head coach to be Roddy’s assistant. This assistant would be a mentor to Roddy.
Somehow then Roddy would be able to discover the magic to making this group of young men do what they must do in order to win.
There is no secret to being a successful head coach in the NHL. Roddy has chosen two capable assistant coaches. The chemistry behind the bench is just as important as the chemistry on the ice. As the pk has begun to click, and the pp has gone from awful to intermittent, I can see how that behind the bench chemistry is taking hold.
Get off Roddy’s back, whydontcha? All this hate against the guy is getting me down.
Look around the league at all the coaches being fired. Some of them have plenty of experience.
Gathering together a group of guys of different ages and experience levels, different nationalities and cultures and languages, each with his own set of hangups and character flaws, trying to get them to work together effectively as a team is quite a task. Then losing a couple of key leaders (Staal and Ferland) for a time and having to work with new players isn’t easy. Now the leaders are back, but only at 80%; another change. Meanwhile, we have a wacky schedule that gives us 4 days off and then 3 games in 4 days. Roddy has expressed concern about too long a rest period and how his guys deal with that. So he has tried different practice schedules in order to keep them in peak performance. So far he has not found the right balance yet. I am certain that as a player he has seen coaches good and bad who have faced this problem. But maybe because he wasn’t a head coach while he was watching, he couldn’t learn and gain experience.
These players are humans. They react to all of the above in varying ways. Laviolette used to complain when the Canes would have a home stand. A couple of times he made the team stay in hotels in Raleigh so that the players were not distracted from having the intensity they needed. Home and family will do that to a guy.
But Laviolette did not have a ton of experience back then. Maybe we should have fired him. But then we did win the Cup with him. That very season, as I recall. And Roddy was there as the team captain.
But I guess since he wasn’t the head coach, he couldn’t learn anything. Right?
Dougie Hamilton is going to be fine. He just needs a partner with whom he has chemistry. He hasn’t found that partner yet. We have that guy in Charlotte. Caj.
Jeff Skinner. How could we have rehabilitated him, preventing his loss? We couldn’t. Last season I watched as Willy worked with him. But Willy is not a magician. Willy tried to keep him out of the penalty box by pushing him away from refs when he would lose his temper at the ref for missing the painful foul but calling Jeff for the retaliation. Willy tried to coach Jeff to get him to set up linemates to score. Jeff was always defense conscious. That is why he led the NHL last year in takeaways. He had a bad plus/minus rating, but so did most of the other Canes.
Nobody had to tell him about the importance of scoring. And nobody had to show him how to score.
I don’t know exactly what happened at the end. But I can surmise. Jeff probably lost his temper at TD and said things he shouldn’t have said. Willy likely recognized that Jeff had an attitude problem. I believe his resentments came from two places:
1) For his entire career the Canes had never even tried to protect him. Now, with 4 concussions under his belt, he knows better than anybody that he has no hope for a long career. Maybe he is even suffering early stages of CTE. That would scare the hell out of me. He knows how lucky he is that he is not as bad off as other small Canes players whose careers and life after hockey were negatively impacted by concussions (Shane Willis and David Tanabe).
2) For his entire career we never gave him linemates of quality. That must be why he developed the attitude that nobody was going to help him, so he had to do it himself.
Of course, he was correct.
I am sure that he used his no movement clause to get just what he wanted. Close to home. Playing with big rough strong men who are told to protect him. And Jack Eichel to skate and score with him.
He must feel as if he died and went to heaven.
And I doubt that anyone is chirping at him about his inattention (real or imagined) to defense. Nobody in Buffalo is that stupid.
I had a really long comment that I just lost to the Commenting System … as if I wasn’t frustrated enough already … I don’t have the energy to recreate it. High level:
RBA has been fine with one exception: team had success early with a certain style and energy; teams countered; we haven’t figured out how to counter back. He can’t coach “finishing” which is our biggest issue on the ice. No one can.
Skinner is old news. We still have unfinished business. Is it going to be offense for offense (like Tarasenko for Necas) or offense for defense? With our drafting history on offense, the risk/reward of giving up a high-end prospect might be worth it; might not be; interesting thought experiment.
I’d prefer Staal for Kessel. As much as Staal is a great player – and I love him – wondering whether he holds the offense back based on line construction. I’m crazy or even stupid. I’m starting to think like William Golden: “Nobody knows anything.”
I just wish we had Lindholm back. He’s the biggest regret I had from the offseason; not Skinner.
Finishing, again haunted us last night: two missed breakaways; 3-5 mad scrambles in front; 6-8 prime shots from close in: and none went in.
Oh, and they scored on a full-screen point shot, two deflections, and an empty netter. Mrazek had no chance on any of them.