Re: Boston University Part IV: Off-Season or New Season?
Maybe woodword or Bernstein should make a call to Warsofsky and ask?!?!?!?
Working on it.
Well, what really stuck out to me was the most frequently heard comment: "We expected..." I didn't see too many "we demanded" comments. The whole thing reaks of just too much "passivity" for my liking. He just seems to "accept" things instead of being proactive about them. It sounds like the enthusiasm is gone (and I don't blame him, to be honest - if I did the same thing for 38 years I'd be pulling my hair out, if I had any left). BUT, nevertheless, to me, in ANY job, that's a classic example of "It's time for a change."
I wouldn't call Parker passive. We know he's not afraid to yell at a ref, bench a player or dismiss someone from the team. I think it's probably just not realizing that something's as big a problem as it is. I think last year, he just didn't realize how big of a problem the team was having with off-ice stuff until it was too late. And I think this year, he just didn't realize that those uncompetitive practices, regardless of how hard guys were working during them, might actually be hurting the team until, again, it was too late.
The last two years in our postseason sitdown with Parker, he's talked about things he should've done during the season to shake things up, and it kind of makes you wonder why it took until after the season to realize those changes were needed. The only thing I can think of is that he thought things were on the verge of improving and didn't want to risk interrupting something just as it was starting to work. I know there were a few times during the season when he said he thought the power play was moving the puck better and on the verge of breaking out, but it never did until the last 10 games. Maybe he thought the same thing with attitude.
Or maybe it was a situation where come second semester, he thought the games were too big to start changing things up and hoped being in the middle of a postseason push would be enough to motivate guys to play harder. Think of it like this. If they had lost the UMass game when he benched Warsofsky or the PC game when he benched Chiasson, everyone on here would've been saying, "How can you bench one of your best players for any game at this point in the season!?" Well, what if he did shake up the power play or the way he ran practices and things got even worse as a result? It would be easy to make changes like that if the team was out of NCAAs and you were just hoping to catch lightning in a bottle for the HE playoffs. But when you're on the NCAA bubble and maybe things have shown signs of improving? It's obviously a tough call.
No matter what decision you make, you're gonna get criticized if it doesn't work. It's either "Why didn't he shake things up?" or "Why would he change that then?" That's why they say hindsight's 20/20. I'm sure there were changes Parker wishes he had made in the 70s, 80s and 90s, too. It's not like he never made a mistake or misjudged anything until 12 years ago.
I'm not trying to make excuses for Parker, because I definitely think a coach should be able to diagnose a team's problems and fix them in-season. Just throwing out my thoughts on the situation and pointing out how difficult of a job it obviously is.
In my personal opinion, I don't think Chiasson is ready to be a captain. I think he has too many temper issues and needs more time to mature. He gets in guys faces, but he does it in a way that annoys them. He doesn't seem to quite understand that that's not necessarily leadership.
Chiasson obviously needs to cut down on the reactionary penalties, but I don't think there's any problem with the way he gets in his teammates' faces. It was pretty evident to me this year that his teammates have a lot of respect for him, even if they don't always like to hear what he has to say. But someone's gotta say it, and I doubt he was ever wrong with what he was calling guys out for. I've heard him call himself out, too. He just tells it like it is. Sometimes a teammate calling you out for something can be more of a wake-up call than a coach doing it. And he always sticks up for his teammates on the ice, which you obviously want from a captain. To me, Chiasson just seems like one of those guys that you absolutely love when he's on your team and absolutely hate when he's on the other team.
The dumb penalties are the only thing I think Chiasson needs to cut down on to be a good captain. The skill, work ethic, leadership and willingness to call guys out are already there in my opinion. When I was working on my feature on him earlier this season, Pereira told me that one of the things the captains wanted to do was to have kind of a designated leader in each class, and that Chiasson basically grabbed the reigns for the sophomore class from Day 1, ran with it and scooped up some of the freshmen along the way. What Parker and Pereira told me while I was working on that, and what I've heard and seen from Chiasson throughout the season, have me pretty convinced that he's captain material. Parker even said he saw him as a captain as long as he stuck around long enough.
