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rooneypoo wrote:Big Ev wrote:rooneypoo wrote:Big Ev wrote:Does Clouston do anything right? Let Karlsson only play 1:28 in the first.
Well, he made a brutally soft play on the Moulson goal.
You guys do realize that Karlsson has been a -20 or so in the last 35 days or so, right?
When when your team sucks, you're going to have a bad +/-. Plus Karlsson plays with Phillips a lot, thus the reason why he gets a lot of minuses.
I think that's a chicken & egg question at this point. If that.
Chris Phillips is a career +82 player, with only 2 minus seasons on the books -- a -5 in 1998-1999, and -14 in 2008-09 (i.e., our worst season in over a decade, excluding this one we're in the middle of).
Phillips is a better player than he's showing right now. I'm surprised how many people don't see that. Aaron Ward was on TSN the other day, & there was no question in his mind that he's still largely the same player, but playing in an awful spot right now.
Anyway, the point is: it's pretty common to bench a young D when he's -20 in his last 15 games or so, esp. when he makes a play like he did on Moulson. CC was 100% justified in that benching, just like he was right to put him right back out there in the 2nd.
There were rumblings about Phillips dealing with personal issues at the beginning of the season, if memory serves. We never really heard anything about it afterwards, but that, coupled with the deplorable play of the entire team, could certainly be a major factor in his inability to find his groove this season.
