Instead of taking responsibility for his own play in net, Roberto Luongo is looking instead to change his luck. The playoff beard is gone, obviously the cause for his troubles in the second round against the Chicago Blackhawks. The goaltender says he’s “trying to change things up a bit” as the Canucks hope to stave off elimination in Game 5 against Chicago.
Shaving off the beard is all well and good, signifying a fresh start and all that, perhaps the complete disconnect between the players’ mindsets about their own play and the reality their coach is seeing that should truly be worrisome.
Shane O’Brien, once praised for keeping his cool and settling in defensively against the Kings, has now been at the forefront of his team losing their collective minds at the wrong time. With their season on the line, O’Brien makes perhaps the most boneheaded comment of them all:
“We are in a situation where probably nobody thinks we can come back; the odds are we probably can’t. We are going to give it our best go.”
While the rest of his team agrees that they just need to stay out of the penalty box, O’Brien decided that perhaps the officiating was to blame, saying that perhaps “that’s our fault for yelling at the refs during the season.”
His coach knows the reality of the situation however, and I’m sure that if the Canucks had a better defensive situation available O’Brien would find his value on this team diminish in a hurry. Alain Vigneault knows that his team was outplayed in the three losses, and that his team needs to learn to keep itself out of the box:
“All the penalties we took are penalties we deserved,” he said. “Officiating has got nothing to do with it.”
If the captain has no heart, why would the rest of the team?