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Message: [QUOTE="DoctahLexus, post: 3019320, member: 6798"] After some thought on the end of game collapse, I believe the coaching staff was specifically at fault for either not seeing the need to discourage quick unnecessary slides to Spencer or seeing that need and simply not doing enough to get that through the defensive player’s heads. Whichever one of those errors it was, it ended up being crucial to the loss. Naturally other factors played a huge part. Losing faceoffs 10-3 in the second half being possibly the biggest of those. Also the two dumb penalties which lead to both easy goals and further defensive fatigue. The team D as a whole was overly scared of Spencer in the second half (despite Mellen overall handling him pretty well IMO but that’s for another post) and it cost us nearly every goal following the man up goals. From our 12-8 lead the goals we gave up besides the 2 man up ones at the start were 1. Bad 2 man game play by Helmer and Mellen caused I believe mainly by Helmer keeping his eyes on spencer at the crucial moment when his man made a cut towards the goal. 2. Mellen making a quick slide to Spencer after he gets mismatched with Dearth and Bomberry did not pick up on the second slide, leaving a man wide open. 3. Good ball movement by Loyola started after Murphy made a totally idiotic slide to Spencer who was both perfectly covered by Mellen and going behind the cage. Loyola moves the ball around the horn perfectly after the slide and puts it away. After that there was one slightly lucky goal where a man got a small step on Helmer 1 v 1 and Porter somehow only got a piece of it. Porter’s positioning may have been slightly off (a little to close to the nearside pipe) but overall just an unlucky occurrence. Then it was the open net goal and that was it. I don’t pretend to know anything about the inner workings of who runs what among Desko and defensive coordinators, but it seemed like someone should have analyzed the results of slides to spencer in the first half. I counted at least 2 or 3 where a slide was not entirely necessary and instead of Spencer taking either a weird low angle shot, or a shot with Mellen draped on him, they got a wide open dunk on the crease. The fact that someone saw those occurrences, and then didn’t DEMAND from the D that they hold off on the quick slides in the second half, is the main complaint against the staff that I can come up with. Whatever the plan was going in should have been thrown out, no matter how many wins that formula has got us in the past. The evidence for a change was too much IMO. But always good to remember that we are far from knowing what goes into the staff’s decisions/the level of involvement they chose to have in each players choices. I am sure if we talked to Desko, Rodgers, and whoever else is involved in defensive decisions, they would promptly bring up about half a dozen factors we have not considered. I would be curious to hear what they have to say. [/QUOTE]

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