How soon we forget.

I think two coaches deserve the honor more for taking teams who were
considered in the pre-season to fall in the second tier and made them
instead solid performers this season in HEA.  Those would be Boston U and
Mass-Lowell (Parker and MacDonald, respectively).  Two over-achieving teams;
your choice, Steve, is coach of a team who slipped a notch.

Maine is a team that by and large is populated by the players who suited up
to take the team all the way to the National Championship game last year, to
lose by a SINGLE goal; only this year they likely hold on by a thread to
limp in to the Round of 16.

This yeam HAS talent, Steve, it simply was not harnessed into an effective
system until these past few games.  Why so late ?

Whitehead has been playing around with line assignments all year, and one
early season leadership candidate has been benched for most of the second
half of the campaign.  A more wide-open playing style that clicked against
Mass-Lowell in 4 recent wins was fairly well absent most of the early season.

Maine played with a sense of urgency only in the last 10 games or so; sort
of like how they played some games in the first part of this campaign -- not
for a full 60 minutes.

I know some think when I say "urgency" I imply a longing instead for the
more "active" game coaching style of our late coach Walsh.   To that I say
that I have seen "active" coaches lead dull teams (Pat Burns when with the
Boston Bruins comes to mind).

If the team played with urgency for 60 minutes and over 30 games I could
care less if the team were coached by a bag of pucks.  When I see less than
a full effort, I look at many places for reasons why, and some of them point
to choices made obviously by the coaching staff.

I get the over-riding sense this team plays and is coached generally not to
lose.

I know hockey as a whole has pretty much been driven to "NJ Devils" style of
grind-'em neutral-trap defence, but isn't it nice to see Maine ramp up the
offense and run it up on an opponent ? (yeah, Jim....)

Whitehead is Coach of the Year only if we add a third in Columbus in April,
no less.

And BTW, Dick Umile could NEVER be Coach of the Year unless he gets a banner
for the first time with those Mildcats....but we know he won't.  Prediction
(using Bracketology pairing from today):  Dov "bars" Durham from a ticket to
Columbus...



steve hayes wrote:

>i would vote for whitehead as hockey east coach of the year for turning this
>team around ......he has taught a team with very little individual talent
>how to play team defense and what it takes to win...........they may not go
>far in the hockey east playoffs or the ncaa but they are peaking at the
>right time and with the freshmen playing like upperclassmen and with howard
>in net just think of the possibilities!!!