Danish team is fun to watch

Well, I don’t want to make too big of a deal of his coaching in this particular game. First of all, it’s difficult to play well in the early stages for teams like USA and Canada. And they drew by far the most competitive group. Even with best coaching you could struggle under these circumstances. It’s a tough job – you don’t know your players very well, you don’t know much about the opposition, you’re not too familiar with your assistants and the hockey is quite a bit different.
But I’m always looking for little things to get more information about Gordon. I like him in general and I think he’s done a pretty good job with the Islanders so far. What kind of hockey they played with this team in some stretches at least over the last two years has been quite impressive. But overall, Gordon is still very difficult to estimate to me. Probably you anyway will know enough about a coach only when he will coach different teams. Obviously, these Worlds won’t tell us anything substantial about Gordon, but I just find it interesting to see him coach a different team indeed.

But back to your question… They surely don’t know very much about them. But well, it’s pretty obvious that Denmark lacks of depth. To be honest, I don’t know how other top teams coach against them, but you certainly could exploit that I think. Most of their 3rd and 4th liners play in the Danish league and it’s easy to tell they’ll struggle against Okposo & Co. I don’t think they’ll get away in 5-10 shifts against the top line or at least will take a few penalties. What I could imagine is that they thought they had a pretty good chance against Denmark (and the whole group) anyway and didn’t want to make it too tactical and just get everyone in the game, give all lines time to build some chemistry, etc. But if that was the assessment going into this group stage, it obviously wasn’t the best way to approach it.

However, why I noticed it is probably because one thing I’ve not been impressed with about Gordon is the way he adjusts to situations and opponents. And the quotes from the article you linked to are another interesting thing. He said: “It’s been a combination (of factors). It’s been a little bit of inexperience and turnovers. We’ve had stretches when we had a lot of sustained pressure, but we haven’t had consistency getting pucks through the neutral zone.” Doesn’t that remind you of so many postgame reactions of Gordon throughout this season with the Islanders? Maybe other coaches often kind of tell us the same things, too, and I just don’t realize it as much because I don’t hear them 82 times per season. But with Gordon it’s really always about execution and consistency and “what gives us success and what doesn’t”, as he calls it. And of course, where the Islanders stand right now, it very certainly is the most important thing to find out what gives them success, whereas getting the most out of every game in terms of tactics might not be top priority. And it’s clear that a team like the Islanders pretty quickly will struggle, when they don’t execute properly. But still, I think it’s been a problem how much bad periods hurt them or how little they got out of bad games or how long it took them to recover from bad stretches. I’m not saying this is all on Gordon and I could right now not even name certain situations, where he should have matched the lines better or form other combos, etc. But he’s just not been very impressive there…

And as great the record against Western teams was, as ugly looks the record (24-31-9) against a very moderate East this season. Only Florida (25-30-9) struggled similarly, but even Toronto was much better (25-26-13). And if most of their meetings against the late bloomers Carolina and Boston hadn’t been early in the season, the record could have been a bit worse even. However, in my opinion a good part of that is the fact that the Islanders didn’t adjust as well to their opponents as they did to them. The Western teams hadn’t seen much of the Islanders’ game and were caught by surprise a bit, whereas the Eastern teams got to know it pretty well over the last two seasons and indeed made their adjustments. With some you could even see it within the season series I think, although those are obviously very small samples. But Atlanta for example played them better every game, whereas the Islanders tried to play them the same way every time and finally got away from it even in a bad sense and showed a pretty ugly performance. And they for example still haven’t figured out how to win on the road against the division rivals (except for the Rangers).

The answer that the team just hasn’t been good enough to execute Gordon’s adjustments or respond to the opposition’s adjustments is still very much in the race. And Gordon anyway deserves huge credit for other things, such as the emergence of Moulson or Schremp I think. And as said, these Worlds mean nothing, but I was indeed a bit disappointed to see kind of the same patterns with this US team as with the Islanders.