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Ted Nolan and his staff may be doing a much better job than most think |
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Buffalo Sabres head coach Ted Nolan is said to be on the hot-seat for the performance of his last-place team.
I know. Newsflash. Right?
We all know the stats which include 16 wins in 56 games, a franchise record 14-game losing streak, last place in goals-for, goals-against, powerplay, faceoff, etc., etc., etc. And if the stats were bad to this point, the impact of losing Tyler Myers and Drew Stafford along with goalie Jhonas Enroth last week will probably further cement their place at the bottom of the aforementioned.
Blame is starting to get thrown around for a wretched season as history will be judging the 2014-15 Buffalo Sabres in a harsh light with Nolan and his staff as coaches of record. While whispers of discontent are said to be emanating from the foot of Washington St., there's not been a direct, full-blown indictment of the coaching staff. That being said, there are more than a few media types and a burgeoning group of fans who believe that Nolan's second stint will be coming to an end in the near future.
At the beginning of the season, most in Sabreland could live with a last place finish and many truly expected it. It's the price the franchise would have to pay to land one of the top two players in the 2015 NHL Draft. The Sabres have been ridiculed and dissected, bastardized and scorned all season long save for a 13-game streak when they overachieved, just like an undermanned Nolan-coached team has the tendency to do.
I'd hazard to guess that there must have been some nervousness in and around the First Niagara Center during that hot streak as plans for Year-2 of a bottoming out period seemed to be slipping away. Winning 10 of 14 games and having the team a handful of points out of a playoff spot probably wasn't truly expected even after Sabres GM Tim Murray did the unexpected in the off-season by landing three quality NHL players.
Brian Gionta, Josh Gorges and Matt Moulson came to the Sabres in the summer as mid-to-longer term pieces of the rebuild. The three would be placed in the midst of a rag-tag group of misfits and youngins that would plug their way through the season. All three are good NHL players with a history of strong, capable play in the NHL, but by no means are they superstars and by no means should the Sabres have been entertaining playoff thoughts at any point in the season.
But after veering from a charted course the ship has been righted (or wronged,) as of late. Since that stretch the Sabres have gone 3-21-1 and are presently seven points behind the 29th place Edmonton Oilers in the standings. That's what an 0-for-January can do to (or for) a team.
Advanced stats, I'm told, reveal that the Sabres have been the same team throughout the year and that hot streak was merely a harmonic convergence of timely scoring and hot goaltending. Scoring 35 goals during that stretch whilst giving up 29 flies directly in the face of their overall minus-89 goal differential and as much of an old-school guy as I am, it's hard to argue that a clip like that was sustainable.
Conversely, a sustained stretch like the one Buffalo is going through right now, garnering a mere seven out of a possible 50 league points, isn't something that should be expected either. With a goalie like Enroth (before he was traded) who's proven to be very capable despite long hot and cold stretches, an offense that has a proven goal scorer like Moulson an up-and-coming scorer in Tyler Ennis plus contributions from others, and a defense that is young and inconsistent but fairly solid, a streak like the one they've been going through, just doesn't seem right either. In the midst of this nose-dive, the calls are starting to get louder that Nolan and his staff simply aren't good enough to get the job done.
But, really, what is their job this season?
Regardless of the talent on the ice, most fans who want McEichel at the draft wanted to watch a competitive team that just fell short every night. It's was dubbed "losing properly" or "losing with dignity" or in the words of Woody, "falling with style." Who wouldn't want an end result where the team could be competitive enough to hang with any team in the league but just fall short when all's said and done. Right? Who wants to watch a 0-14-0 stretch where their team was outscored by a 61-21 margin?
Up until a recent February stretch where they've been in all six games save for being shut out vs. St. Louis (they even won two of those,) this team looked anything but competitive for the better part of 20 games. And much to the consternation of a portion of the fan-base and various media-types, this is not the way it was supposed to work this season. If they were going to lose, this group wanted to see the team go down with a fight just barely losing each game.
For anyone to ask that of a team, any team, especially one that's bereft of the talent like the Buffalo Sabres are right now, is asking a coach to pull off one of the greatest coaching feats of all time.
Nolan has been blasted at times, and recently a Buffalo media person had this to say, "I don't think even Murray expected this team to be this bad. It's a bad roster for sure. But Nolan and the staff bear a lot of responsibility for things like the abhorrent special teams."
It was penned a couple of days ago in a chat session.
Methinks, although I'm not a national, regional, or Buffalo media-type, that within the words "special teams" is the word "special." And the word special could have two meanings. The first, a glorious one, meaning a team has special talent, enough to take advantage of and/or overcome uneven situations. The other leans toward special needs. And as the situation has revealed itself this season, the latter seems to be the truer of the two for this edition of the Buffalo Sabres.
Amongst the additional comments was this about the status of Nolan in Murray's eyes, "Very iffy at best. Murray makes the roster. But things like special teams, bad line changes, lack of systems are on the coaching staff."
Simple fact. In less than a week after taking over as GM in January of 2014, the name of Luke Richardson, head coach of the AHL Binghamton Senators, was brought up to Murray during a radio interview on a Canadian station. In a 2+2 scenario, Richardson's name is once again coming to the fore as things have gotten progressively worse over the course of the last eight weeks.
Although Nolan and his staff should be taking responsibility for "abhorrent special teams, bad line changes and lack of systems" perhaps the context should be altered to a positive for the long-term well being of the franchise. It's probably the only way they can do what's necessary this season to keep them on track while still keeping the anti-tank society somewhat at bay.
If the Buffalo Sabres had been poor over the last eight weeks as opposed to historically awful, they would not be in the position they are now which is the preferred position, in my opinion, of upper management.
So Nolan, in this writer's eyes, is not so much doing a poor job coaching as he may not be coaching to his, of his coaching staff's fullest capacity. If they were, based upon Nolan's track record, they'd be a notch or three up in the standings.
I find it hard to believe that he's made it through three decades of coaching without a clue as to "systems." Or that somehow since his last stint on Long Island that he's lost his knack for line changes. Or that his powerplay coach, Bryan Trottier, has no idea what to do on a powerplay. Success is talent-driven and Nolan has always been able to overcome a lack of talent to at least achieve respectability.
Prior to last season, it's been decades since the Sabres have been at the bottom of the league and I can't even remember what it felt like. But I can feel it now and the barbs being thrown around in the name of integrity are easy for me to slough off as inconsequential and harmless.
Then again, my ass isn't on the line.
The true measure of what Nolan can do for this team might be measured once they're pretty much locked into 30th place. That may take a few more weeks of the Sabres losing and teams like Edmonton continuing to tack on points but once they're secure, it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to see a team go on a pretty good run to finish the season. One similar to that 10-3 run they had a while back (although that might not be enough for him to remain behind the bench.)
Signs of the team climbing out of the abyss have already emerged. A powerplay that started out the season at 2.9% "efficiency"rate and was still in single digits to end the 2014 calendar year is beginning to click. Since a four-game stretch from January 8-15 when they went 0/12 with the man advantage, they've scored on the powerplay in seven of next 11 games. That stretch has yielded eight goals in 30 opportunities for a 26.7% conversion rate. And the best part about it, McEichel fans, the team went 2-9-0 during that stretch.
It should be noted that they are now 0.1% points behind the Colorado Avalanche in that department without having the luxury of young offensive weapons like Gabriel Landeskog, Matt Duchene, and Nathan MacKinnon, a scoring veteran like Jerome Iginla or a defenseman with offensive acumen like Eric Johnson.
Nolan may not last after this season and years from now people will point to the numbers and say that he and his coaching staff were awful. As a person who has and will challenge conclusions drawn strictly from analytics, I offer that there's much more than just the numbers themselves by which he and his staff should be judged.
In my opinion, I think he and his staff are doing a helluva job.
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