So here's a nice meatball of a game to come home to. The Panthers are a total fucking mess. They fired Dale Tallon this summer and replaced him with their AHL head coach, Tom Rowe, and named some guy named Eric Joyce as assistant GM. Here's the background on this good old-fashioned hockey man:
Quote:
A native of Boston, Mass., Eric has held numerous positions throughout the US government and the private sector focusing on national security. Most notably, Eric served as an Army Captain during Operation Iraqi Freedom III in Mosul, Iraq from 2004-2005 and was awarded the Combat Infantryman’s Badge, the Bronze Star and the Valorous Unit Citation.
Eric is a 2002 Graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point, with a degree in Systems Engineering, and is also a 2011 Graduate of Harvard’s Kennedy School with a focus on International Relations and econometrics. His hockey experience includes playing at the United States Military Academy from 1998-2002, where he was a member of the ECAC All-Academic team.
Kind of weird to have a minor-league coach as GM, though, right? So then they fired Gerard Gallant, made him wait for a taxi home, and slid Rowe down from GM to head coach, ascending the West Point econometrician to general manager. This was probably the plan all along, because the owner is another West Point man such that he redesigned the Panthers to pay tribute to the Army. They want to be a hardcore ANALYTICS~! team, but they couldn't because Dale Tallon kept insisting on signing useless clods like Derek McKenzie and Shawn Thornton, or paying Dave Bolland to exist for like the next six years even though he'll probably never play again, so Tallon got kicked upstairs and now the whole team is supposed to be in the hands of dudes who went to West Point, with Tom Rowe functioning as a useful idiot who does what he's told.
Of course, the real reason the Panthers are struggling this year is that their top forwards are injured and all their defensemen are gone. Bjugstad and Huberdeau have been gone almost all year, Jokinen I think was hurt, and Barkov always seems to have nagging injuries. At the blue line, they overhauled pretty much the whole thing except Ekblad thus:
Brian Campbell: wife wanted to move back to Chicago, there was no getting him back.
Erik Gudbranson: 3rd overall pick in 2010, I think, total bust for his class and position, traded to Vancouver for I don't know
Willie Mitchell: old, not asked to come back
Dmitri Kulikov: traded to Buffalo for Mark Pysyk
In addition to the Pysyk trade, they signed Keith Yandle, who can't play defense, Jason Demers, who was the beneficiary of a threadbare free-agent market, and I think Jakub Kindl, who more or less flunked out of the Red Wings. Those players aren't bad, and Gudbranson and Mitchell certainly weren't great, but there's something to be said for a group of guys jelling and playing their roles well -- something the analytics crowd misses.
I read Fels say something about how he's rooting for the Panthers to succeed so they can prove everyone wrong by using analytics successfully. How is this a hill to die on? What does he think the Blackhawks did? They built a team around puck possession and won the Cup three times! Yeah, they had some pieces of shit like Adam Burish or Brandon Bollig, and maybe Joel Quenneville isn't a slave to numbers, but they did everything right, or at least as right as possible, by the Corsi fanatics.
Anyway, beat this shitty organization.
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Molly Lambert wrote:
The future holds the possibility to be great or terrible, and since it has not yet occurred it remains simultaneously both.
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