…..Ouch

“You used to love to drive me wild girl, but lately now you get your kicks on just knocking me down, down, down…”-Bruce Springsteen

The final three games (maybe more, if they make the Hockey East playoffs…and that is a big IF, at this point) are a formality.  This team is dead in the water, a once promising season washed away.  They have had four semi must win games to right the ship, and they fell flat on their face in all of them.  They are mentally defeated before they take the ice.

I could get into the games this weekend, how they scored once lousy goal (and it took a 5×3 to get it), and how mind-bogglingly awful they have played on defense, but that is really beside the point.  This is a team that has no mental toughness, that doesn’t respond to adversity, and who expects the worst to happen to them.  It’s now a self-fufilling prophecy.

The only person I can blame for it is Toot.  This team has pretty consistently folded down after Christmas break.  It’s very much a trend at this point, almost to be expected.  I never really blamed him before, because in the past, at least to me, it seemed UMass was not among the most talented teams in the league.  They were over-achievers, who battled hard, but ran out of gas late in the year as more talented teams hit their stride.

This is absolutely, positively not the case with this team.  This team has talent.  They have a great first line of scorers, some talented defenseman who move the puck (though you wouldn’t know it lately), and at the very least, average goaltending.  And yet, the second half skid remains in tact.  This one among the worst?  Why is that?

In my opinion, it’s a culture thing.  Paul Dainton said earlier in the year something to the effect of “People are wiating for us to collapse, but it’s not going to happen this year,” after the Merrimack win in Amherst.  At the time, I loved the comment.  I thought maybe this team was going to be a little different.  That they could succeed where other Mass Attack clubs have failed.  But now,  I have an issue with it.  My issue is….before the Christmas break, when the team was still playing relatively well, this team was thinking about a second half collapse.  I hadn’t seen anywhere in print, radio or any other form of media, anybody anticipating an epic fall for this team.  But inside the Minuteman lockerroom, they were already thinking about it.  It’s a part of the culture there, and that falls on the coach.

Maybe that’s not fair to Toot, but I honestly believe at this point the only way this team will become a national power and majore player in Hockey East is to change that culture by removing the coach.  Maybe I’m wrong.  I hope I’m wrong.  But I don’t think I am.

If you think I’m crazy (and it’s been suggested), let me know.  I’d like to get a dialouge going about this.  This could be an emotional reaction, but I think I’m being pretty rational about it.  But let’s get it going.

-Josh