Disappointing weekend, to say the least. Congrats to the Tigers, they played a hard 60 minutes both nights and absolutely deserved victory. Very easy to see why they were picked to finish #1 in Atlantic Hockey. But back to the Falcons.
Friday's game was extremely disappointing to watch. Just sloppy, sloppy, sloppy. It's tough when you're playing 5 men on D with Solovyev out, but still no excuse for the countless careless mistakes that were made. Can't tell you the number of times where I literally face-palmed at bad touches/passes, poorly played offensive breakouts and just thoughtless plays on the puck. There were about 7 minutes during the second period where we actually looked like a capable team. And by capable team, I mean we maintained possession of the puck for more than 10 seconds at a time. Special teams were also extremely lacking. Argue actually played a decent game Friday night, he just had no support.
Saturday night we seemed to come out of the gates looking a lot better, tape to tape passes, good movement through the zone and just a better sense of teamwork. Then it all just fell apart. Two shorthanded goals allowed near the end of the period, one of which was completely on Argue, and we once again dug ourselves into a hole that was just too big to climb out of. Something that REALLY frustrated me about Saturday night were the lines that Soder put out. McDonald-French-Schmidt actually worked pretty well despite not scoring, but the line that really got to me was the 4th line. You've got Sieckhaus-Kucerovy-Suter, and Soder might have had them on the ice for a total of 3 minutes the ENTIRE game. Why would you put those guys in the lineup if you're legitimately not going to play them at all?! Especially when you're sitting guys like McMurphy, Kauppila, Ahlgren and Gorowsky??? It is just nonsensical to put guys in the lineup and bench them the whole game instead of playing TOP LINE TALENT. That said, I think our real downfall this weekend was our preparation and coaching.
We approached Friday's game with what seemed like the completely wrong attitude. We tried to play them extremely physical, and they are just a BIGGER team. Every time we dumped and chased, we would lose the battle for the puck because we would get out-bodied along the boards. Yeah, we played a sloppy game and made a lot of mistakes that absolutely contributed to the losses. But we just looked hopeless out there, without a game plan. And then after getting physically beaten on Friday, Coach decides to totally neglect the fourth line and overwork our top 3 lines, making them more tired and making it that much tougher to keep up with a team that is 6 pounds bigger than us on average.
Well, all I can say is that it's a **** good time for a weekend off and hopefully we can come back better than before vs AIC on Nov. 8th.
