Re: Harvard Crimson - 2015-2016
Lots of thoughtful analysis by recent posters...now we should all take a look at the last four or five post-game interviews to get a peek into Coach Stone's thinking (or at least that portion of her thinking that she chooses to make public.
And not only does she touch on a number of the issues you've raised on this thread but...boy oh boy does she ever sound like Claude Julian! In those daily at-length quotes in the Globe.
She characterizes this year's squad as, essentially, a lunchpail team that lacks the individual offensive talents of many of its opponents and must therefore compete by relying on hockey intelligence, enthusiasm and grit ("jam" is her word).
Tactically, her bugbears include hubristic attempts to make pretty individual plays ("we've got to keep it simple, play north-south, don't make clever passes to nowhere"), not driving to the net enough, poor shot selection, overpassing on the power play.
Like Julian, she ruefully notes that some of the F line combinations that the coaching staff thought would have great chemistry have turned out to be out of synch, and she has recently juggled them (though nowhere near as frantically as Julian). She also says that the D pairings had gone stale (a euphemism for "had gotten into bad habits"?) and in the Yale game she put Tse up with Picard, paired Frazer with Mastel, and paired Rachlin with Ziadie (who were both +1 with Zadie scoring a goal by jumping up on a long juicy rebound). It will be interesting to see how many minutes the Picard-Tse pairing will now log...it's like when Julian, towards the end of every season, stops pairing Chara with a neophyte and pairs him with the club's second-best D.
She describes how she totally revised the personnel and tactics of the PP in the 19 hours between the Brown and Yale games....more movement, different looks, less aimless passing, more blasts from the point (including the one that Nikki Friesen tipped home).
I continue to be puzzled by the question of how to asses the play of the three Ds from the Class of '17. They were the 3rd, 4th and 5th Ds two years ago (just as they are now), on the undermanned squad that nonetheless made the NCAAs, and when Frazer was injured for half the season, the other two were logging 25 or 30 minutes a game. True, all the Beanpot schools and some of the ECAC schools were missing key players that year, but on the other hand the three '17s were just freshmen then, so you'd sort of expect them to be as good this year as they were then.
One consequence of Mary Parker's absence besides the loss of her all-around individual play is the effect it's had on the third line's role. Last year there was such incredible depth that Katey often rolled three lines with equal goal production, so that even on the road, the opponent's third line had to match up with one of those three lines. This year, absent Parker, the third line has reverted to the classic Stone role of energy line: forecheck and back check like the wind, see if you can keep cycling the puck 180 feet away from your own goal, and you've had a valuable shift...don't worry about scoring. So opponents can now concentrate their defensive effort on stopping the top line(s).
