Couturier Wins Selke Trophy
The National Hockey League announced on Thursday evening that Philadelphia Flyers has won the 2019-20 Selke Trophy. Couturier won the award by a wide margin, with 1,428 voting points including 178 first-place votes among the 170 ballots cast by the members of the Professional Hockey Writers' Association. He also received 27 second-place votes, and eight votes for third place. In total, Couturier received top-five votes from 163 of the 170 voters.
This is first time Couturier has won the award, which officially goes to the league's best defensive forward but has become, in reality, an honor to recognize the best two-way forward. Couturier finished as the top runner-up two seasons ago.
Four-time Selke Trophy winner Patrice Bergeron finished second in the voting this year, garnering 884 voting points including 21 selections for first-place. Last year's winner, Ryan O'Reilly received 816 points (including 11 votes for first-place) to finish third.
“It’s a great honor. It wouldn’t be possible without my teammates, coaching staff, management and the whole organization believing in me. I’d like to congratulate Patrice Bergeron and Ryan O’Reilly as well, two great players who I respect a lot and also had great years," Couturier said in a statement released by the Flyers.
Rounding out the top 10 in the voting were Tampa Bay's Anthony Cirelli (612 voting points, 11 first-place votes), Vegas' Mark Stone (210 points, two first-place votes), Montreal's Philip Danault (175 points, one first-place vote), previous Selke winner Anze Kopitar of the LA Kings (33 points), Colorado's Valeri Nichushin (32 points), Boston's Brad Marchand (24 points, one first-place vote), and Tampa Bay's Brayden Point (24 points, one first-place vote). Others receiving a first-place vote included Nashville's Nick Bonino, Toronto's Auston Matthews and the Rangers' Artemi Panarin. In total, 38 players received at least one voting point.
Couturier has become just the third player in Flyers history to capture the trophy. Bob Clarke won the Selke Trophy in 1982-83, followed by Dave Poulin in 1986-87.
Ron Sutter finished second in 1985-86 and Mike Richards placed second in 2008-09 before Couturier earned the top runner-up spot in 2017-18.
Joel Otto, a two-time Selke finalist as a member of the Calgary Flames (1992-93 and 1994-95), finished fifth as a member of the 1996-97 Flyers. Michal Handzus, a finalist in 1999-2000 as a member of the St. Louis Blues, finished 8th as a member of the 2003-04 Flyers. The Slovakian center split the Selke ballot with Flyers teammate Keith Primeau, who finished sixth the same year.
Later a two-time Selke winner with the Carolina Hurricanes, Rod Brind'Amour's highest Selke finish as a Flyer came in 1998-99; ninth place. Simon Gagne, an excellent two-way forward, was hurt by the fact that the Selke has historically been a center-dominated award. A left winger for most of his career, Gagne never placed higher than 12th (2005-06) during his career, although he did earn three first-place and a pair of second-place votes.
Couturier averaged 19:50 of ice time per game this season -- tops among Flyers forwards -- including 2:02 on the penalty kill. He was called upon to play 20 or more minutes of ice time 31 times this season. Although the Quality of Competition (QOC) stat has fallen out of favor among analytics devotees, it is nevertheless worth noting that Couturier still plays some of the "hardest" minutes across the NHL, frequently matching up head-to-head against opponents' top lines.
The Flyers' addition of Kevin Hayes alleviated some of the burden from Couturier, but Couturier is still the team's go-to "shutdown center" in addition to the team's reliance on him to provide a healthy share of offense.
One of the most dominant faceoff men in the NHL, Couturier won draws at a stellar 59.6 percent clip (59.9% at even strength, 62.8% on the power play, and 53.5% on the penalty kill).
Meanwhile, he was second among Flyers forward with an on-ice 55.55% expected goals percentage at 5-on-5 and tops the team with a 56.25% Corsi. He had more credited takeaways (40) than charged giveaways (36). Bottom line: The Flyers demonstrably spent significantly more time with the puck than without it -- and generate more quality scoring chances of their own than they give up -- when Couturier is on the ice.
As noted earlier, while the Selke is officially a "defensive play" award, it has evolved over time into a "200-foot-play" honor that requires offensive performance as well as strong off-puck play. This past season, Couturier only went as many as three consecutive games without a point once the entire campaign (Oct. 24 to 27).
On the flip side, he had 14 multi-point games, two point streaks of four games (Oct. 15 to 21 and Jan. 2 to 8) and a five-game point streak (Oct. 29 to Nov. 7). Over the final 26 games before the NHL pause, Couturier posted 24 points (10g, 14a) and a +10 rating.
For the fourth time in his NHL career, Couturier dressed in every game of the regular season. He has only missed two games over the past three seasons combined. Just as important, an array of both primary and underlying statistics showed that Couturier performed at an elite two-way level regardless of his linemates. In fact, his presence almost inevitably lifted the performance of whomever was on his line.
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Chuck Fletcher Exit Day Transcript
On Thursday afternoon, Flyers general manager Chuck Fletcher held a remote Exit Day media availability session. He then did a
one-on-one interview with Jason Myrtetus for Friday's edition of Flyers' Daily for the Flyers Broadcast Network.
Below, courtesy of the Flyers, is the full transcript of Fletcher's Exit Day session with the local beat writers.
Would you say that it’s fair to say that the way that the round robin went gave maybe a false sense of security as to how ready the team was to get back to the caliber of play they displayed before the pause?
There’s a couple different things there. First of all, the pause was in March and I’m not sure there was a big correlation between what happened before the pause and what happened in the bubble for any team. For a lot of players, I think everybody had to get back into game shape and get their chemistry going again. Get their timing back. They’re really two distinct seasons. Almost no different than what happens in the course of a normal summer when you come back from a season and you start over again in the fall. I think there was certainly, it was a much different feeling. It was really a different season in a lot of ways. We played pretty well in the round robin. I don’t think the intensity of those games were the same intensity of the play-in games. I think there was a little bit of an adjustment at the beginning of the first playoff series. Having said that, we won three of the first four games and found a way. It was different, but it was the same for everybody. I thought our guys made adjustments as the play went on.
Could you shed light on any other injuries that players may have been dealing with during the playoffs? Is anyone scheduled for surgery?
The second part of the question, as of now, nobody is scheduled for surgery. This year it’s a little bit different obviously with the circumstances with the world. A lot of the exit physicals are being done through telemedicine, being done virtually opposed to in person. Many of our players did not come back to Philadelphia after the playoffs. We’ll see if anything else emerges. As of now, there’s no surgeries scheduled. We had a bunch of guys banged up.
In terms of the obvious injuries, Michael Raffl is dealing with a high ankle sprain that he suffered in the game against Boston in the round robin. He was able to get back and play pretty well. Then he kind of tweaked it again and had to miss a couple games. He came back and I thought played well again. It’s a real tough injury and I give him a lot of credit for battling through. Aube Kubel took a shot off the inside of the knee. Fortunately it was only badly bruised, but the swelling was pretty bad. I think he ended up missing a couple games, maybe close to a week. He was able to come back and get back to mostly full strength. We were fortunate in that regard. Some guys were playing through some minor things, but those are the two, three players counting Couturier that missed time due to injury.
What are your impressions of the team going forward here?
You’re always really disappointed after a tough playoff loss. Losing a Game 7 is tough. We go into that Game 7 and we were one of five teams left playing in the NHL. 26 teams are already done. You’re one win away from getting to the final four, which is tough to do in any year. You’re always disappointed at the end of a playoff run. When I look back to where we were 17 months ago when we had a press conference in the same room I’m in now, you guys were all here in person and we talked about the things we had to do. We fast forward 17 months and I think we’ve come a long way.
I think the coaching staff deserves a lot of credit. I think we were on pace to reduce our goals against by 60 in one season, which is incredible. Offensively, we were better. Our special teams were on a net basis fifth best in the league. We showed a lot of progress. We had a lot of young player get better. Our goaltending situation stabilized. Our defensive structure was better. We played the right way. We’ve made a lot of strides, yet having said that, when you get in the playoffs and lose in the second round, it shows you have more work to do. The goal for us is to continue to improve and hopefully make as many strides in the next twelve months as we did in the past year and see where that takes us. I think a lot of our young players learned a lot during the playoffs. The playoffs are a different level of physicality. There’s not as much time and space. You like to hope that some of the lessons that they learned will help us down the road.
How’s Nolan Patrick feeling? Are you expecting him to play in 2020-21?
Nolan’s feeling better. He’s skating. He’s working out. He’s golfing. He’s living mostly a normal life. I think he’s made a lot of progress since March. Until we get him back and get him into a contact situation, it’s probably going to be hard to know exactly when he’ll be ready to go. He continues to improve. Yes, I’m counting on him playing at some point in 20-21. We don’t even know when we’re going to start the 20-21 season. Time is certainly on his side in that regard. He continues to make progress and I continue to be optimistic.
Last year, you said the doctors didn’t believe that the migraines weren’t connected to his late season concussion. Is that still the belief or has that changed?
Well, there’s lots of different opinions. I don’t even know how to answer that. Everything could be connected. It may not be connected. It’s been a tough go for the young man. He continues to get better and make progress. That’s the good thing. At this stage, it certainly looks like he’s going to get his quality of life back. Hopefully he’ll be able to come back and play hockey for us. He’s a real important part. I think as we saw in the playoffs, the ability to have three quality center that can play 200-feet and produce offensively is incredibly important. He’s a big part of that future for us.
What were you left regarding the power play? Is it just a different atmosphere in the playoffs that played in to it? Do you think you need to make some progress there to make it work?
Over the regular season, our power play was better. I think it was very inconsistent. If you look at the thirteen playoff games, we struggled to score. There’s no question. You look at the ten-twelve games prior to the pause, I think we were #1 in the league. The power play showed the ability to score at times and obviously at times it didn’t. It’s inconsistent. For these exact reasons, we’ll have to dive into that.
I know we’ve made adjustments. We’ve made tactical adjustments. We moved people around. We switched sides that we operated off of, and we weren’t able to find a way to score in the playoffs. Obviously a lot of time and effort was put in. You also have to be careful, it’s a small sample size. It’s obviously a critical sample size. We really could have used some power play goals. Then again, you go back certain times this year, you can find ten, fifteen games, where we were clicking. Why that is? That’ll be one of the questions we have to answer and certainly we’ll look hard at it.
When you evaluate your group now, do you feel like maybe you’re an acquisition or two away from taking the next step or do you have what you want internally with your youth and prospects that you can rely on them to take the next step?
The way this franchise has been built, preceding me and going back to Ron Hextall and what his mission was. Clearly we’re an organization that’s put a lot emphasis on drafting and developing of players. We have a lot of young players that are either on the team or trying to push their way onto the team. I don’t think it makes sense to do a 180 and change philosophy at this point in time. If look at it practically, we have a flat salary cap here for the next two or three years more than likely. Over the next three years, we have a lot of players currently on our team that are good players that are going to require new contracts.
Everything we do, we’re going to have to do looking at a two to three year window versus just a twelve-month window. We’re going to have to make sure that we manage the cap properly and we have the resources that we need to get the good young players that are here. Having said that, you’re always looking to add pieces if you can to help your team. We will do that, but I don’t expect us to be a major player in free agency over the next couple years. I do expect us to aggressively try to keep our own players and obviously we’ll be working the phones to see what we can find on the trade front. We have a lot of good young players who still have their best days ahead of them. Experiences like we went through during the past four to six weeks only helps them in their development and helps us get to a better place next time we get into the playoffs.
What is your off-season agenda and the things that are at the top of your list? How do you have your off-season laid out?
The priority obviously is we need to look at re-signing the players that we have, our own free agents. Next week, we’ll sit down internally as a staff and talk to the coaches. This week was sort of a week of decompression. You’ve got to take the emotion out of it. There’s obviously a lot of emotion when your season ends suddenly, which it did last weekend. This was a week to regroup mentally. Next week we’ll get together, dig into the numbers, dig into the observations and take a look at what we feel we need to do to get better. We’ll also have to look at what the demands of the market will be for our own free agents and go from there.
Obviously we have the draft in about three weeks. We’ve been working on that for months, so there’s not a lot of work that has to be put into that. Still there will be some conversations. There will be a lot going on the next month. We’ll look at every angle we can to improve our team with being too emotional, making sure we’re making the proper decisions.
How much confidence do you have in Carter Hart for the future?
Carter’s a very good young goaltender and he performed really well in the playoffs. He performed well all year. I think at the beginning of the year, he struggled a little bit on the road, which I think is more of a fluke. Do I think there will be regression next year? No. He’ll probably have a more normal record on the road. He’s always played really well on the road at every level. If you look at what he’s been able to do, it’s a tough league for young players, never mind young goaltenders. He showed the ability to win games. He showed the ability to bounce back after tough performances, which you’re always looking for. Everybody is going to have tough nights from time to time. His ability to turn the page very quickly was impressive. Carter’s going to be a big part of it, as are a lot of our other young players.
I think on the whole, you look back. Ivan Provorov and the way he improved. Phil Myers and Travis Sanheim, I thought gave us some tremendous performances during the season and during the playoffs. Konecny, Oskar Lindblom, hopefully Nolan Patrick, Joel Farabee, there’s a lot of very good young hockey players here that are only going to get better. As they continue to grow, our team will continue to grow. I really think we have a lot of good years ahead of us here. We’re going to have to make some good decisions, but I think it’s a very exciting time to be part of this organization.
Can you please talk about Sean Couturier’s season and why he is a worthy candidate of the Selke?
I think AV spoke about it a little last week. You have a man here in Sean Couturier who took a few years in the league to find the offensive part of his game, but a guy that plays the right way defensively. He understands the game, doesn’t cheat, wins battles, wins faceoffs, very good on the forecheck, very good in his own zone, very good penalty killer and very good on the power play. There’s flashier players than Sean Couturier. In terms of just getting the job done, matching up against top players and producing in the clutch, he’s a remarkable player for us and certainly is a worthy nominee for the Selke Trophy. A guy who’s really driving the bus for this team right now.
With the realities of the stagnant cap, what do you see as this team’s biggest positional needs going forward?
I have my own personal feelings, which I will give you right now. In another week or two, I’ll get together with the group and get their ideas. I always like to do everything from a collaborative standpoint. There’s a lot of things that I don’t see that other people do. I’ll take full advantage of that.
What became clear to me in the playoffs, we didn’t get a lot of production out of our bottom six. That’s an area. I think we had two goals from our bottom six in thirteen playoff games. One by Raffl and One by Pitlick. Raffl had a couple of other goals when he played up and JvR had some goals when he played up. When they were dressed as bottom six forwards, they scored two goals in thirteen games. I thought during the last couple months before the pause, that was one of our strengths. It dried up a bit during the post-season. That’s an area we have to look at. You hope if we can get a healthy Lindblom and Patrick back, both of those guys are clearly top nine forwards. You would hope that would help address that need. That’s something we’re going to have to look at.
The other thing is a little bit is still defensive depth. Wyatt Kalynuk chose to sign with a different team rather than sign with us. He was a young man we were kind of counting on, coming into the organization this year and pushing, giving us a little more depth. We have Cam York coming down the road. Zamula is turning pro. I think defensive depth is another area that we have to be mindful as we go forward.
Can you evaluate the season like if you had to give it a grade? Do you think you have to be active in the trade and free agency markets?
For the first question, I’ll let you guys do the grades. I’m not very good at that. You look at the regular season, I think we had the largest point percentage increase of any team in the NHL. We went from being an 82 point mediocre team that really struggled to play the game the right way to a team that was on pace to give up 60 fewer goals, to have a 100-plus points, had home-ice advantage and started to play the game the right way. I think we made dramatic improvements across the board.
Having said that, I think everybody recognized in the playoffs showed that we have more work to do. I don’t think we necessarily have to do anything necessarily in the free agency market or the trade market. We have some holes that we have to fill. Certainly going to have to supplement some of the core pieces we have right now. The biggest source of improvement that we have, it’s the way this franchise is set up, is going to be our young players. You can’t do a 180 from that. We have a lot of good kids coming. If we provide opportunities for these young players, as we saw this year we had Sanheim and Myers in the three-four hole and that was, in the short run I thought they did well. Obviously there was some inconsistency, but those kids are going to be much better down the road for the experiences that they had this year.
That’s part of the long-term plan. Joel Farabee had a lot of opportunity to play top nine minutes this year. You look at the role Konecny had and some other players along the way. We had some young guys get a taste of it this year. The Bunnamans and Frosts, players like that that got a taste and hopefully serves them better down the road. We’re not looking to deviate from that. If we can improve our team, we will. We’re going to continue the long view here and some of these kids are going to come very quickly. We’re excited about that.
Do you think with the flat cap for the next few years that we are going to have more hockey trades now and free agency be less valued for general managers? How is it all going to play out for the NHL and you guys as we move forward here?
It’s going to be interesting. We’ve had a lot of those conversations. During the pause, we had a lot of time to think, maybe too much. If the cap is flat for three years, you have to look at it this way. There’s a lot of teams right now that don’t have cap space already. The teams that do have cap space over the next three years, every one of them has some young players that are going to get raises, potentially big raises. Teams that spend money on UFA’s this summer and have young players aren’t necessarily going to have any more money in year two and year three.
Eventually by the time you get to year three, how much liquidity is there really going to be in the system. It’s going to be tight for everybody. Does that mean prices come down on free agents? Does that encourage more hockey trades, dollar for dollar trades? Possibly. I think that from a logical standpoint, that could make sense, but we’ll see. There’s several teams worse off than we are. We’re one of a group of teams that has enough room to do our business but not a ton of room. Then there’s a handful of teams that do have some room. Some of them may not even spend at the cap, depending the realm of their internal situations. There’s not a lot of liquidlty in the system at all, so it’s going to be interesting to see how it plays out.
I do think we’re well positioned with our young players. We have the ability to re-sign these young guys and we have the ability to improve from within. Not every team has that luxury.
Tyler Pitlick and Derek Grant can be UFA’s this off-season. What did you think of their seasons?
I don’t know if I want to get into critiquing everybody. I think all of those guys, all the free agents, you can include Braun and Thompson, I think they all came in and played to their role. Played to the role we asked them to play and played well. Over a thirteen game playoffs, I think every player on our team had some games better than others. That’s probably the same for every team that played in the bubble. I think they did what was asked of them. They provided us depth. We’ll sit down here with the coaching staff, our analytics groups and our pro scouts. We’ll go through and look at what we think we need to do going forward and whether we’ll extend offers to them or not. At this point, we’ve just told everybody to give us some time here and we’ll take a week or two to decompress. We’ll be prepared to make those decisions.
What is the status of Nolan Patrick’s next contract negotiation?
Certainly we’ll have to work through that with the agent. We haven’t stated that process. The focus right now is getting Nolan back to full health. As I noted earlier, he continues to feel better and perform more activities off the ice and on the ice, he’s sleeping better, so we feel his health is improving and that’s obviously been the foremost concern. I don’t know if I want to get into answering that question, talking about individual contracts, but every contract has its own challenges when you’re doing negotiations and that certainly makes it tougher. At this point, our goal is to get him back on the ice and get his career going. I have a lot of confidence that if we can do that and Nolan plays to his potential, that down the road he’s going to be a man that should be able to sign some nice contracts.
Are you interested in bringing Brian Elliott back?
Brian played real well for us. I was happy with the quality of play he gave us. Early in the year I think we gave him some really tough games, second half of back to backs when our team wasn’t really clicking and I think that maybe knocked his numbers down a little bit from what they were. When Carter was injured there in the second half, Brian came in and played really well for us for a while, he won a lot of hockey games. He played well for us in the bubble, and certainly he’s a guy that has the respect of his teammates and the organization. We’ll have a chance to sit down and talk to his agent. We’ve had a couple general conversations about it, and we’ll continue to communicate and see what the future brings.
Does this roster need another big-time impact player to take the next step?
We’d all love another goal scorer. I look at the top line and they didn’t produce [in the playoffs] but again I can just tell you from what I guess we call it the eye test, from watching the games, I thought they had a lot of zone time and generated a lot of chances. I know their shot share and expected goal numbers were really quite good. I think we did a lot of good things, we had a lot of zone time when they were on the ice, but for whatever reason, the goals didn’t go in. I think they were even at 5 on 5 despite controlling the play by a lot of different metrics. It’s 13 games, those are critical 13 games, but you’ve got to be careful sometimes of putting too much into any 13-game sample size. For two months before the pause they were clicking, the power play was clicking, and in the playoffs, they weren’t finishing and the power play wasn’t finishing. But they were getting looks.
I think our top guys played hard, the goals didn’t go in for really a lot of our group, we didn’t have a lot of guys who were really finishing. Could we use another goal scorer, sure. Do we have one in house that’s a few months away from being developed, maybe. We have some good young players that once we get them in the lineup they’re going to produce offensively. But you’re always looking for top-end skill, so if we can find something we’ll continue to take a look.
You were just discussing young players. Do you believe Morgan Frost is one who will ready within a few months to compete for a regular NHL lineup spot? On a related note, given that the American Hockey League has different economic realities than the NHL and their season might not correlate to when the NHL season starts, does the ongoing Covid-19 situation affect your off-season plans with prospects on the Phantoms?
It’s going to be a challenge. I’m assuming at some point here there’ll be direction from the NHL as to what we can and can’t do with players if the season start keeps getting pushed back. Certainly that’s something we’ll have to monitor.
I think for some of these young players though, and in particular with a guy like Morgan Frost, his game on the ice is pretty good. There’s’ some things he has to work on – his play away from the puck, managing the game at certain times, and learning when to fight and when maybe not to fight in terms of trying to make a play through the middle of the ice when something’s there and when it’s not there. The biggest opportunity he has now is added strength.
If you don’t play for a few months, this a great opportunity for Morgan to continue to work on his strength, and that’s an area that frankly he needs to improve a little bit if he wants to compete. We saw that in the playoffs, it’s extremely physical, the Islanders and Canadiens have really big defensemen, they punish you at every opportunity, and it’s just a much different type of hockey than what we see in the regular season. Trying to add strength would be something that would really help Morgan have a chance to be successful in that type of hockey in the future.
Do you have any idea what’s going to happen next year with the schedule?
I have no idea. I believe Pierre LeBrun interviewed Bill Daly the last couple days. There’s a notional start date of December 1, and I believe Bill’s words were he thinks that’s less likely than more likely. We all see the world we’re living in right now, and it certainly seems logical we may start later than December 1. Anything could happen now, any type of format could happen. I think we have to be prepared for probably a different type of schedule, maybe more three-in-fours, maybe there’s more back-to-backs in whatever schedule format we come back and play.
I think depth will be critical, and again I think we have lot of young legs in the organization, some of the kids that got games this year, and some of the kids we’ve signed between Sandin, Laczynski, and Allison up front, I really like our depth. So if we do get into a compressed schedule, I think we have a lot of players who could certainly play games. As I mentioned before, we’ll need to look at our depth on defense. But I think we’re going to have to be prepared to have a lot of bodies, and for situations that we’ve never encountered before. But that’s just the world we live in, and we’ll try to do what we can to be as prepared as we can.
Does the team need to add speed?
Montreal’s got a lot of quick forwards for sure. I guess the biggest disappointment for me in the playoffs was I thought our defensive detail slipped. The way we played the game prior to the pause I don’t think we brought that game to the playoffs. Part of it may be that guys struggled to score, and when you struggle to score sometimes you tend to cheat, tend to force plays. We turned the puck over a lot more in the playoffs than we did prior to the pause. I can’t tell you how many times it seemed like our F3 got caught in the offensive zone. You certainly have to give a lot of credit to the Islanders and the Canadiens, they pressured us.
But my point is that when you turn pucks over and you don’t have the puck, it’s hard to generate speed and it’s hard to play fast and it’s hard to score goals, because you’re defending all the time. We played two teams that played really well. The Islanders, if you go back to preseason and the regular season and the seven games we played in the bubble, we played them 12 times this year. They beat us nine times, and all 12 games they scored three or more goals. We didn’t play them well this year. Why? We’ll have to dig into it.
They’re a heavy team. But it’s hard to generate speed when you’re defending and having your defensemen get run through the end boards. There’s certain things I was a little disappointed in with our forward group, and I think that’s something that will be a focus in camp again, to get playing the right way again. Typically when you play the right way, you have the puck more often, you have the ability to complete a couple passes and generate puck speed. A long-winded answer, but I think we made it more difficult on ourselves than it needed to be.
Do you think it will be necessary to remove players from your current roster just to stay under the cap?
No I don’t think so. We’ve modeled it different ways. I think we feel we can be cap compliant and bring back the players we want to bring back. But as I mentioned earlier, we’re going to be looking for opportunities too in the trade market if we can. A lot of teams will be. But I think we’re in a pretty good position depending on how you model it.
We feel over the next few years we can re-sign the players we need to re-sign without making dramatic changes. But again you’re always looking for opportunities to move some pieces around. I mentioned a little bit more defensive depth, but I think there’s certain areas that we might have to be mindful of as we go forward. And again, there’s always going to be things that happen – players that play better that what you anticipate, maybe make your team quicker; some other players that maybe don’t play as well or as we saw this year have unfortunate medical situations that you have to adjust to.
We always have these plans, and they have a tendency to change and you have to continue to adjust, but we’re in an OK position right now to do the work that we need.
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