DropEmJayBird wrote:DelPen wrote:The Snapshot wrote:NashvilleCat wrote:DelPen wrote:Don't even care about the streak. Great defensive game. Gave these ******* nothing. And we get Malkn, Letang and Morrow back soon.
This team has changed it's style and effort dramatically. Amazing how much better the goalies look now too, eh?
Let's just say that this team also has confidence now that the goalies are making the saves they should and some that they shouldn't. Amazing how good the D looks when that happens, eh?
The TEAM defense is outstanding right now. Very few mistakes and when everyone commits you get wins.
I agree with Delpen - Snapshot argues that good defense play comes from goalies stopping a dump in - and the defense suddenly feeling confident enough to finally pay attention to their defensive responsibilities, I argue that the goalies look much better when the other team doesn't get 400 quality scoring chances.
I mean - either both Fluery and Vokoun all of a sudden had a change at the same exact time, or the team focused and tightened up their defense resulting in a streak of low scoring goals.
No, I just mean that a team cannot go on this kind of streak allowing 1 GPG with goalies that were allowing 2 soft goals per game. You can argue chicken and egg all you want, but the goalies were allowing shots that should not have been goals end up in the net. You do that consistently and the team is going to scramble - and yes Vokoun bailed Fleury out in Philly and the team got better from that point on.
When you hear them saying that they just "made some minor tweaks", I guarantee you that meant to start doing the fundamentals of defensive coverage - meaning do your job not someone else's, including the goalie's.
Fleury - to his credit, stopped the leaks in his own game as of his next start as well.
Early in this streak the Pens offense bailed the goalies out, not the other way around. They have allowed over 30 shots in a number of the games where they have allowed only 1 goal, and there have been many quality chances in them. The goalies are making all the saves now.
The Montreal game was a terrible game by the goalie, not the team. The Flyer loss in Pittsburgh was an ECHL level performance by Vokoun. The Pens win in Philly was a terrible performance by Fleury. If you just go back and watch the goals in those games where everyone was freaking out about our D you'll see that they were shots that should have been stopped or big, fat, juicy rebounds - yielding two or more softies a game.
Agree to disagree, but both facets are rolling now.