Re: Minnesota Gophers Season Thread: 2014-2015
You can't replicate game situation in practice.
I'm guessing you have not seen of a lot of ice time in hockey practices. Because that's completely false.
I've been in hundreds of practices as a player where the coaches ran drills that emulate top speed game situations, half and full ice stop time scrimmages, stacked isolation drills at full speed, etc. I've also run on ice team practices myself and done it. Even summer hockey schools do it quite well. As I stated, it happens all the time.
I'd note that I am not a Lucia fan-boy. There are things that I see and hear that I don't really care for (and that is not limited to just this season). But the team's struggles in converting quality opportunities into goals isn't an area that I fault the coaching staff. The players have to bear the responsibility for the failure to cash in on the opportunities for success that they have been put in the position for.
No, the coaches and the players bear equal responsibility for success and failure. Coaches must never be allowed to coach with impunity. The responsibility of the coaching staff is to mandate time for individual skill and team development in practice sessions, especially when glaring weaknesses like poor shot selection perpetuates week after week. Since the Gophers continue making the same mistakes, I suspect that's not happening.
As Travis Boyd stated recently, if we don't change, we're going to continue making the same mistakes every week...more reps = greater shot accuracy. It's the responsibility of whoever runs the practices to mandate time to fix it...that's what they're paid to do. It's a players responsibility to give their absolute best effort in practice to learn and improve their game to contribute to the team's success.
Ambroz scored a shoot-out goal at a critical point just a few weeks ago. He scored a nice goal earlier that game. He had the highest percentage of success in penalty shots of anyone on the team going into the game. He, according to the coaching staff, routinely looks good in practice situation taking those kinds of reps. Given all that, he seemed as good (if not the best) of an option as anyone.
Ambroz's goal was a garbage goal rebound off a blueline shot and was not due to any extraordinary skill move on his part. The puck bounced in front of him, he shot a backhand without even looking and fortunately it went in.
"He had the highest percentage of success in penalty shots of anyone on the team going into the game"? Not sure what you're referring to here, but to my knowledge no one has scored on a penalty shot for the Gophers in three seasons.
Overall, the Gophers are 0/5 in shootouts and this season have a shootout goal/attempt percentage of 22% (2/9) vs 45% for opponents. So choose Ambroz because he made 1 out of the 2?
That makes no sense at all.
Ambroz is clearly having a down year and based upon what I've seen from him this season, he would definitely not be my first choice for the penalty shot. Kloos, Boyd and maybe even C. Reilly have all proven they have much better hands, moves and scoring potential than Seth Ambroz. IMO that's the criteria for your decision to give you the best shot, not Ambroz scored a goal earlier or he scored one of our shootout goals last week. And in reality he choked on it, didn't he?
Yeah it's not like these players can't shoot, every team and even the best players in the world go through shooting cold streaks that can last an entire season (look at the Capitals sh% last year sans Ovechkin, they were shooting like 3% at even strength for a while). That isn't the case here, the Gophers are #17 in the nation in terms of sh% at 9.8% which is a bit down from last year but not terrible by any means.
You're using the wrong stat to make your argument. They're 32th in even strength goals this season. Last season they were 4th. Arguably, there are several problems with this team, but not consistently burying their 5 x 5 opportunities because of poor shot selection and accuracy is a major one.
Realistically you can't expect this team to score on 20% of their shots, it's just not going to happen, even if they still had Bjugstad and Haula.
No one consistently expects 20%.
Using G/SOG without controlling for the confound, they averaged 7% in the last 8 games. Michigan currently leads the nation with 12.4%. With the Gophers currently averaging 33 SOG/game, that's an average of 2.31 goals/game. That's a formula for a losing season.
My final comment in regards to the original topic of discussing the Gophers shooting woes is the coaches definitely know how to emulate a game situation for real time shot practice.