Re: Minnesota Women's Hockey 2016-2017 (aka Season 20)
I don't doubt that they missed 21 but I don't see them making up that 6 goal deficit with her in there at 100%. That was all I was saying.
Cameranesi wouldn't have made up that deficit by herself, but it could easily have been a completely different game because of the cascading issues that ARM brought up. Aside from those, the mental aspect played a role. I think, "We have to make up for Dani's scoring," got stuck in their heads, because I saw a lot of players trying to do too much. Wisconsin's second goal resulted from Wolfe making a bad play at the offensive blue line.
The second line was especially guilty of this. Piazza, Reilly, and whoever was playing the other wing on a particular shift got caught up ice constantly, so there wasn't any of the backchecking pressure that this team depends upon. Reilly scored, and the line generated chances, but the trade-off wasn't a net positive. Would they have played differently if they had had confidence (whether or not justified by the actual results) that the first line would chip in its usual 2-3 goals a game? Who knows. On the one hand, it would be really nice if Piazza and Reilly would start scoring like they did last year, but they need to do it organically within the system they've been playing. It's also why I think, with perfect hindsight, that moving Schipper to the first line was probably a mistake; it caused more disruption than it helped. There wasn't any way to know that in the twenty hours the staff had to plan.
Over on the Wisconsin thread, there's been some comments about the goaltending on Sunday, which I think are largely misplaced. Peters didn't have a good game, but she sure as hell wasn't the biggest, or even the third or fourth biggest, problem they had. Yeah, it would be nice if she'd stopped a couple more pucks, but those were great scoring chances the team in front of her was allowing. Watching her, I don't think that stopping odd man chances is her strength, so maybe the others should concentrate on not giving up so many of them.
As I said above, what happened was the result of a lot of things going wrong, many of which were, I suspect, unique to the moment. Not all of them, but a lot. I think they'll be mentally a lot more ready to play without Cameranesi this coming weekend if they have to, they'll have had time to practice line combinations. And maybe they won't be without her.
Some of those issues are real and ongoing. Without Cameranesi, I don't think they're a threat to win the national championship, but most of these teams have someone on the roster that's that important.
