Re: An Era of Good Feelings
Re: An Era of Good Feelings
Ok, I don't think you're giving quite a fair assessment of Katey's coaching performance.
Teams don't necessarily need great coaching to win a lot of games with a bunch of Olympians and an all-star goalie.
Sure, but there are also teams with Olympians who don't live up to expectations either. And Harvard was generally more consistent over the last decade than other teams that had similar levels of talent.
The very best coaches achieve during the season at levels beyond expectation based on their rosters on paper, and tend to also manage to inspire their teams to play their very best hockey once they get deep in the playoffs. But teams with good coaches don't always find a way to succeed either if the talent isn't competitive, or the injury bug hits.
Agreed. And if you look at most Harvard teams in the last decade, they did better than expected based on preseason conference and national predictions. The only exception really was the 06-07 team which never could seem to win the biggest games but still took the eventual NCAA champ to 4 overtimes.
And you can definitely find examples of Harvard teams that succeeded without top-flight talent. The 05-06 team still won the NCAA title. I think it was a big achievement for the 09-10 team to still hold on to NCAA home ice once Kessler was injured.
And if we care a lot about comparison's with Princeton, Harvard has advanced to the ECAC semifinals every year since 1998-99, while Princeton's only ever done it twice. Obviously Harvard's had better talent most of that time. Now if you swapped coaches, do you think Kampersal would have done better than Katey did at Harvard, or Katey at Princeton? It's hard to tell. But I think the last two years are the closest the teams have been in terms of having similar talent levels, (considering Harvard post-Kessler in 09-10) and clearly Harvard made the ECAC semifinals both years and Princeton did neither.
Last year a couple of things struck me while watching the NCAA Frozen Four. First, that Cornell was playing way over their heads, infinitely better than they had for most of the season. The team looked so driven, yet loose and totally in sync with each other--despite not really having the wealth of talent that some other teams may have had, and an extremely depleted roster. Similarly, that UMD, after an underwhelming start to the season, was also firing on all cylinders. But what struck me most, (well, other than Shannon Miller's jacket
), was how unbelievably loose Miller was on the bench, cracking jokes and clearly having lots of fun with her players in the middle of an OT final. I'd never been much of a fan of Miller, but gained a whole new level of respect for her after last year's performance.
Sure, though lots of successful teams tend to look like this. I'd say the same was true for most highly successful Harvard teams. Maybe the 2002-03 team was a bit too tense down the stretch.
To me, Dartmouth's win over Harvard last night wasn't particularly surprising. Harvard has shown a lack of discipline over much of the season in taking a large number of penalties versus other teams. A further issue it that its penalty kill has been mediocre, as has its own power play. Contrast that to the success of Dartmouth's power play this season, and you had a recipe for Dartmouth to prevail purely on the basis of special teams. Dartmouth took advantage. Two of Dartmouth's goals came on the PP in short order and put the nail in the Crimson Coffin in the second period.
I agree with this paragraph. Dartmouth had a top 5 PP power play, Harvard had a bottom 5 PK. This has been very uncharacteristic of Harvard hockey, as I said earlier in this thread. Harvard traditionally has had very good special teams, even when they might not have had the best talent. For example, the 2001-02 team still had the No. 1 PP in the country with no Olympians.
I do believe the high penalty minutes and pitiful PK of this Harvard team are the biggest failure of Katey Stone's coaching career. But I don't think that's an indictment of her more generally. And generally I don't think you give enough credit to her success on the few occasions when she had less talent and for her level of success when she had more talent.
Next year's team basically has no senior class. I tend not to follow recruiting more closely, but I think it'll be one of the weakest group of players Harvard has ever had. It'll interesting to see how they perform.
