BOSTON – When a head coach has to stop practicing and lie down on a team, that's never a good thing.
That's even worse when 57 games happened in the season.
The islanders can say they will have a brave face, talk good games about the must-see Thursday's match against the Bruins, and continue to fight until the very end.
But in Wednesday's practice scene, Coach Patrick Roy said everything you need to know when he spent a long time lectured his team after a sloppy start.
That noise about how islanders do so many good things even in losses?
The head coach was also tired of hearing it and didn't hesitate to let players know it among the F-bombs.
After that, calmed down, Roy said he just wanted his team to regain confidence and swing.
“I wasn't uncomfortable,” he said. “When things don't necessarily go your path, you lose a bit of your confidence. You just want to continue practicing the right way. When we're losing the game like the last four, you want to make sure you keep working hard in practice.
“If you want to go back to the winning side, you need to continue practicing. I felt like I've relaxed a bit about the coverage of D-zone, especially today's practice. So I just wanted to remind them, and keep practicing the right way. The Hockey Gods weren't the last game, I saw it. There were screens, chip-ins, etc, but in this game you can't feel sorry for yourself anymore.”
Roy spoke from his days with the Avalanche when Colorado lost the first two games of the playoff series with the Red Wings at home.
Back in Detroit, 2-0, he said everyone in the room was worried, including himself, but Roy made a point of singing in the dressing room to try and loosen things up.
“I was scared, but I felt like I had to show the swlink,” Roy said. “Don't let the other team know what I'm afraid of. We were scared of coming in Detroit 2-0, but that's what we want to see from our group: a bit of a swagger.”
Clearly, that's far from what the islanders are showing now.
Officially, their playoff chance is Caputo. They have six points ahead of seven points, with six teams ahead. And Friday and one week can be very different.
There was rebellion in the room when faced with similar circumstances over the past few years.
We didn't take on the same atmosphere on Wednesday.
Theoretically, at least the strength of the islanders is that they are veteran teams who are experiencing war together and know what they need to do to fight through the playoff push.
The reality is that the head coach stopped practicing on February 26th to warn him of effort, and then there was talk about correcting details that should be a second nature for a group of veterinarians.
“When we're losing the game, it's like we're not doing or what we're doing, shooting ourselves with our feet a bit,” Bo Horvat said. “We can't do that, and if we want to win these games in the future, we have to pay attention to the details. It's not just about playing the game, outside noise, distractions, troubling, and playing the game.”
The only thing you do for players is to plow forward. But the closer you reach the trade deadline, the harder it will be to justify management doing the same thing.
“It's frustrating to see other teams winning when they lose a game,” Jean Gabriel Pago told the Post. “But the only thing – you can't feel sorry for yourself. What you can do [is to] You win the next game. Hopefully another team will lose. That's everything you can control. Control what you can. It definitely gets frustrating after a game that lost.
