Bob Hartley and Patrick Roy's NHL Adams Award seasons...

The Calgary Flames are having a rough start to the 2015/2016 season. A surprise to many after such a successful (overachieving?) 2014/2015 when Bob Hartley won the Jack Adams Award as NHL "Coach of the Year". The rough start has gotten to the point where people are now speculating on how much longer Hartley will last as Calgary's coach.

The same speculation has come up many times in similar situations, as it did last season with regards to Patrick Roy, who led the Colorado Avalanche to the third-best record in the league in 2013/2014 and won Coach of the Year as a rookie NHL bench boss. The Avalanche didn't make the playoffs last season. A quarter of the way through 2015/2016, Calgary and Colorado currently sit last and third-to-last in the Western Conference.

For the record, before last season Calgary had missed the playoffs for five seasons following five seasons where they made the playoffs. Colorado, meanwhile, made the playoffs for 10 seasons after moving from Quebec City, went in and out for four years, then missed the playoffs for three seasons before Roy was hired. Hartley has been with Calgary since the summer of 2012.

Now, I finally get to actual point of this post (sigh) - the difference between Bob Hartley's award-winning season coaching the Calgary Flames last season, and Patrick Roy's award-winning season with the Colorado Avalanche the season before. And that difference is night and day.

Last year, Hartley got the Flames to work together better as a unit than many other teams with better players, while Roy had the benefit of a award-worthy season from goalie Semyon Varlamov for the Avalanche. In 2013/2014, Varlamov carried his team on his back. Beyond the basic statistics of goals and assists, Colorado was not a good "team" team.

While the loss of one of their better players would have hurt Calgary last year, the loss of Varlamov would have destroyed Colorado the year before. While Varlamov definitely deserved consideration for the Hart Trophy as "Most Valuable Player" - and should have been a finalist, IMO (he was fourth in voting) - Patrick Roy should not have even been a finalist for the Jack Adams Award.

And this has nothing to do a coach's previous experience, which should not be a consideration at all. However, it should be evident that their work as coach was a key factor in their team's actual success and/or improvement in a season. Varlamov's play with Colorado allowed players on Colorado the opportunity to show off their individual skills, but in turn caused them to neglect their team game.

Had Varlamov's game faltered in turn the players and coaches would have likely readjusted to try and improve overall team play, but he didn't, and no one seemed to notice that the team's success had more to do with Varlamov's.

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While Semyon Varlamov is hardly an average goalie, there have been a number of average goalies over years whose careers would be largely forgotten save for a single season (some a single game) where they found a groove and played a major role in their team's success.

Very, very few forwards or defensemen have ever been able to carry a team by themselves for a single season, and you only need one hand to count the number players who have had the preternatural ability to carry almost any team almost any season.

Anyhoo...

The need to create...

One thing I really need to do to be satisfied at all in life is create something every day. Which I have not been doing much at all for a long time. This post, if it's all I do today, is itself something creative. If I can at least do something like this every day I'll be doing so much better.

I hope to follow this up with another post. Which is basically already done, as I just want to do a cut-and-paste with edits of a comment I made to a gaming video on Steam. When I post comments online, they're most often sparked by a single thought, but develop into something more, and usually much longer. Similar to this post after the first paragraph. LOL!

That said, I'll end this post here, as I do want to make that other post, and I do have a bad headache at the moment.

Anyhoo...