I have – no joke – about 14,000 words of quotes from Caps’ breakdown day last Friday at Kettler Iceplex. Have done a few posts already and will put together more throughout this week on various topics that came up. One of them was the job the coaching staff did preparing its team for the first-round playoff series with Montreal and the adjustments that were – or were not – made. Washington general manager George McPhee wasn’t the only one at Kettler defending coach Bruce Boudreau. His players have all heard the proposition that Boudreau’s system doesn’t work in the playoffs or that he was out-coached by Montreal’s Jacques Martin. He didn’t make enough line changes (VERSUS analyst Brian Engblom has said this repeatedly in recent days), he didn’t make adjustments on a 1-for-33 power play. There are all kinds of opinions floating around. So let’s let the guys in the room have their say, too.
Caps F Eric Belanger
“It’s not like we gave up 30 goals. We didn’t score. If you would ask me before the playoffs, in the last three or four games, we would have scored one or two goals a game, I would have said you’re crazy because since I’ve
been here we’ve scored four or five or six games a game if we needed
to. And for some reason, we couldn’t score. It’s not like our defense
was lacking. I think we played good defense. We just didn’t score the
big goals in the power play when it was time.”
Belanger played for Boudreau in 1999-2000 and briefly in 2000-01 in the minor leagues at AHL Lowell. He noted that Boudreau has changed very little since then as a person or a leader, but that his system is far more structured and that it was “sad” some are calling for his job. Another player who has been with Boudreau for a while now is Caps F Brooks Laich. He went even further.
“I wish I could swear about [criticism of Boudreau] right now but I can’t, because that criticism is unjust. Nobody cares about the Capitals more than Bruce. There’s no coach in the NHL that’s more prepared than Bruce. He’s at the rink earlier than any coach, he watches hockey later at night than any coach. Any criticism directed toward him should be directed toward us as players. We didn’t execute. And none of the blame should be on him. He makes the game so easy for us to play. I can’t say enough. Him, Dean Evason, Bob Woods. I’ve raved about these guys. I’ve raved about Dean for the five years I’ve been with him. Bruce, I won a championship with him so I know that his style can be effective in the postseason. Just the blame falls on us as players, and it should be in no way directed towards any of the coaching staff.”
Caps F Brendan Morrison
“You can’t stick this on the coaches. We had a game plan. Our game plan was to get pucks deep, get pucks to the net. We were guilty at times of turning pucks over and then creating chances, but for the most part I think if you look at Games 5, 6 and 7 we easily could have won any one of those games.
Caps F Scott Walker
“Every team over the last while, when you look at Stanley Cup winners, I think Detroit is a highly skilled team and they won it on that. Carolina when they won it that was a run-and-gun offense, I think people would say. New Jersey always won it with a good defensive trap, low-scoring teams. Then you see teams win it that are big and physical like Anaheim…I don’t think you can fault Washington for being too run-and-gun. We were in the games. The game is 2-1 at the end.”
Caps D Mike Green
I’ve actually watched some of the games. It’s funny, there’s all of this talk about, “Is it our system?’ The whole season, the question is whether we [could] be a defensive team. Then we get in the playoffs, and it’s now it’s about, ‘Can we score goals?’ When we scored the most goals in the league. Unfortunately, we ran into a really hot goaltender at the wrong time. The thing with us is we relied on our power play so much, being 25-percent for two, two and a half years. Things didn’t work out. We needed to adjust as players and as a unit and we didn’t adjust.
Now, I know relying on the public words of players isn’t perfect. They are – for the most part – going to say what they should say and not necessarily what they think. But when teams deal with adversity cracks almost always start to show (see: Redskins, Washington). And it is telling that no one took an implied shot at the coaching staff – even guys like Belanger, Morrison and Walker, who are all unrestricted free agents. We talked to a dozen players on breakdown day. We caught Green on Monday. We saw Mike Knuble, Jason Chimera, Semyon Varlamov and Karl Alzner after the Game 7 loss last Wednesday. The only players that haven’t made public comments are Tomas Fleischmann (told by Caps public relations staff he wasn’t needed on Friday), John Carlson (already had been returned to AHL Hershey for their playoff series) Alex Semin (may have said something in Russian to somebody somewhere). Not sure what Milan Jurcina or John Erskine could have said since they didn’t play in the series. The only guy I’m not sure about is Dave Steckel. Likely just an oversight, which is too bad because Steckel can be refreshingly honest when he wants to be. But I think you get the idea. Players weren’t about to throw their coach under the bus. Green and Ovechkin, among others, explicitly took the blame on themselves. That has to mean something.
