Re: Providence - 2009-10 In-season Thread
2-1 win on the road......the glass is filling again......schedule the parade.....great game but we are still in the box too often and another too many men on the ice 2 games in a row for it thats mental......but we may not be cellar dwellers again this year......go Friars
We are still taking about 4 minutes a game less in PIM's then in Pooley's last years.
A part of me does agree with you but I think overall I'd like to revisit this stat at the break and see where we are at.
For instance last year out of 58 teams we were 57th in PIM's. Which of course is wonderful, but more then one person on the PC thread gripped about PC pushed around, not hitting, or being too passive. You can't have it both ways. You get more aggressive you are going to take more penalties
Since this is still a small sample size its possible we could trend to taking less as several factors work themselves out:
1. You have 4 inexperienced defensemen. I did not see or even hear last night's game but Brown's late penalty is clearly one you'd like to avoid. Also Alex Velischek in his learning curve has been called for 7 minors already, certainly the boarding call at the end of the 1st the other night was unnecessary.
2. You are trying to instill a more aggressive tone with your forwards. Jon joked with me just before the opening faceoff about MacKinnon getting in the box so much, and before he got back to his seat MacKinnon would be sitting out his first penalty. The trade off is that by being more aggressive he is getting more involved in the offense. He's on pace right now to more then double his best year to date. Maybe not world beater type stuff but a key to PC having some offense. I'll take it and hope he finds the happy medium
3. Penalties are bad new not because of the totals, but our ability to kill them. Presently we have improved greatly from last year(it had to we were the worse PK team in the nation) and if the trend continues I'll take it, but right now we rank 33 out of 58 which still leaves plenty of room for improvment. Its possible it will come with more defensive experience and maybe reaching the point that he feels comfortable adding a freshman or 2 to the PK rotation. Certainly even with a more defense bend to our game we have been very aggressive at looking for opportunities to attack on the PK. We must have had 5 chances between Bergland and Germain. We got but one shorty last year and that was one area Jon Rheault gave us a big boost.
4. I'm going to also guess with not all the pieces figured out or some missing the moving around of parts has messed up some things. Despite scoring a goal Collins is a boarderline D1 player, he took 2 of those penalties the other night. I'd also think it plays into the too many men on the ice. You flip your lines, move players in or out at this point and uncertainty on who is to be one or off might creep in. If we continue to get too many men on the ice penalties yes it needs to be addressed, but those are the only 2 in the 7 + 1 exhibition games we've played and this was the week he had to adjust the lineup the most with the loss of Cavanagh and O'Connor.
5. Points of emphasis also tend to cause higher penalty totals early in the year.
6. My bigger concern is that there is such a disparity in penalties we've taken and those called on the opponent. Its a trend that has been in place the last couple of years. It might be a sign our talent is still below average and they resort to penalties to recover. It might be lack of experience since we haven't had a veteran team except for the McDonald team. In the past it might also be that we were too passive and since we did not force things you did not draw any. However we pressed the issue a bit on Friday and we did not draw any. As I noted 5 times we had chances between Germain and Bergland and they drew nothing (and I'm not saying there should have been UMass played those well), but the point is even short handed our forwards are driving for the net which we have not done since Nate Meyers did his immitation of a tank
