Eight Minutes with Scott Gordon 12-11-09

My lunch hour today at Iceworks garnered me this amazing amount of information from Scott Gordon:

Regarding Jesse Joensuu being called up from Bridgeport to be in the line-up against the Bruins: “Obviously were a little small without Jax and Bergy in the line-up. So, it’s a concern. One thing that we’ve lost is an element of physical play. I think that’s been accumulating over this stretch. It’s not that we don’t want to make hits. It’s not that we’re skating into hits. We’re not fore checking like we want; like we were a month ago. It’s been deteriorating. We’ve had moments of it. But we’ve gotten away from our pursuit of the puck and that has just come from a lack of practice time or not when we have had a practice we probably could have done a better job of making that a point of emphasis in our practices.

And then he continued in his very technical style, and I think I actually learned something.
“It’s very hard. If you look at the pursuit on the puck of what we’ve had prior to Toronto, I think our pursuit had stopped at the top of the circle when it should be to the goal line. If you’re doing that, if you’re pursuing on the puck to the goal line, your hits will find you. It will make sense. But if you’re skating hard to the top of the circle and then you glide to the man, the man moves the puck in. You lose momentum and the puck moves so it doesn’t seem like a situation where the hit is warranted. So it’s a combination of a lot of things. I am trying to make sure that we don’t overextend guys in practice. And with the limited amount of practice time, we probably lost some attention to detail. And that’s something we tried to address today. We’ll try to be more attentive of that. “

There are so many details in this game of lucky bounces.

While Gordon has not created his lines for tomorrow, Comeau was on a line with Tavares and Moulson today. Robbie Schremp was "getting some extra reps" too. But it doesn’t matter what color jerseys anyone wore in practice today or what position they played. “Everybody has the same responsibility. It doesn’t change with personnel.”

Scott Gordon and company finally got to put away the suitcases as they will be home for the next few weeks. But that doesn’t mean they can take it easy.
“We certainly can’t take for granted that because we’re at home, the points will come easy. You always hear about teams who come off the road and then the first game is a game you have to guard against. You can’t just say ‘Okay, we’ve got the home jerseys on and we’re okay now.’ For us, we have to ramp it up because obviously, we were close to a point in Toronto and we lost it. It would have salvaged the last four games of the trip had we come away with a point or maybe two.”

Until Jason Blake decided to score the game winner for the Leafs and I was left to ponder how to react at that on the couch.

“So it puts us in a little bit more of a hole than we would have liked to be in coming through that stretch.”

With rehabbing goalie, DiPietro playing tonight in the Sound Tigers net, he let up one goal on 15 shots through the first and second periods. He did not play the third, and the twitter chatter is that he felt a little stiffness or something to that effect. When Gordon was asked when he would be returning to Uniondale, he answered “ I don’t know if he’s playing another game up there or if he’s coming back. I don’t think any decision has been made on that." (And that’s Garth’s decision to make actually. But the Sound Tigers did WIN tonight.)

Regarding tomorrow’s upcoming game, I’ll admit I lost track when he was talking about the Bruins. But he knows they are a good team who is getting some good goaltending right now, even though they struggled earlier in the season.

“They’ll tell you, when they were coming off last year, they probably got away from what made them successful. And some times you have to go through those struggles to identify, ’This isn’t us. This isn’t our identity.’ And I think that’s what really happened with that team.”

With the injury bug once again biting the Islanders, information is sketchy. Even at the time of the media scrum, Jackman was listed as day to day. And when I asked about the Captain’s return date, I got “Dougie isn’t even practicing with us. There’s no time table until he can even practice. He’s skating, but he can’t practice.“

Okay, now for the time out question, or my MotherSlap of the Day.

FWWAAAPPP!!! To all those who have at one time or another strapped on a pair of skates and now think they can coach an NHL team from their couch. I read a lot of message board banter regarding Gordon’s perceived reluctance to use his time out. This is what he had to say when I asked him about his decisions:
“There are so many TV time outs. There’s a time out every 14, 10 and six. So it’s like, a lot of times when you’re thinking about calling a time out, it’s there. It doesn’t make sense to call a time out with two minutes to go in the period when you’re going to be in the locker room and you can address it there. I called a time out in Toronto two weeks ago, and we got scored on right after. So it’s like, big deal. You call a time out and it ends up in the back of your net. I called a time out in Boston after Boston scored their second goal. I think there was maybe five minutes to go in the game and they ended up scoring right after I called a time out. So, it doesn’t necessarily mean things are going to turn around.”

No. It doesn’t. So for all those sitting at home yelling at the TV, “Call a Time Out!!,” let the coach do what he knows how to do. He’s got a little more experience at it.