Patrick Roy's Misguided Tirade Shows Complete Lack of Accountability as Coach

On Wednesday, Colorado Avalanche head coach Patrick Roy was interviewed on Denver ratio station 104.3 The Fan about the problems with his team.

He had a long list. He cited injuries and he cited goaltending. He complained about the drafting and about the loss of Paul Stastny. He criticized his core and his leaders. Conspicuously absent from his list of complaints was the head coach, a man who has now overseen two consecutive years of declining performance in Denver.

We should start with Roy’s complaints about goaltender Semyon Varlamov, because his comments in that area are a microcosm of the entire interview:

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Sometimes, some nights it’s on the goaltender’s shoulders to close the game. It doesn’t matter if you have 10 shots or 25 shots, you have an opportunity to protect the lead and keep the game as it is. That’s the beauty of the position; it’s the part that I loved about the position. It allowed me to make the difference and seal the deal for the team. Has [Varlamov] done that enough? No.

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Roy, one of the greatest goalies of all time, cites his memory of himself in the clutch as proof that Varlamov hasn’t been good enough in pressure situations. The trouble is that Roy’s memory is wrong.

Back in 2009, blogger the Contrarian Goaltender actually looked at how well top goalies had done at closing the door in the third period of playoff games. Roy, who had a brilliant 0.923 save percentage through two periods, performed terribly when defending a one-goal lead in the third, with his save percentage dropping to 0.892. Far from shutting the door, on nine occasions he allowed the opposition to come back and win the game, posting by far the worst win percentage of the five goalies considered in this study.

He was a brilliant goalie, but his memories of closing the door and sealing the deal regardless of the number of shots faced simply don't match his observable record.

Doug Pensinger/Getty Images

It’s also tough to criticize Varlamov’s work in the third period. I went back through his game logs and crunched the numbers on his performance in the first and second periods as compared to the third period:

• First two periods: 1,156 shots faced, 98 goals against, 0.915 save percentage
• Third period: 500 shots faced, 42 goals against, 0.916 save percentage

With Varlamov this year, despite all the ups and downs, he’s been the same goalie in the third period that he is in the first two.

It’s an interesting contrast. Roy puts himself on a pedestal, but his record defending leads in the playoffs was actually pretty bad. He publicly criticizes his goalie, despite the fact that Varlamov has been just as good in the third as he has been in the first two periods. It’s a self-serving analysis, and it’s a false one.

Bruce Bennett/Getty Images

Roy’s criticisms of Colorado’s drafting have more merit; it hasn’t been good. However, management deserves blame there, too. After all, it was management that allowed the team’s best late-round find in years, Joseph Blandisi, to sign with New Jersey because it couldn’t be bothered to offer him an entry-level deal.

Roy’s most scathing criticism, though, was of his team’s young players, the core of high draft picks the club has assembled:

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We need to be stronger mentally. We need to bring character players inside of this dressing room. That’s what we’ve been trying to do; [Francois] Beauchemin’s won a Cup in Anaheim, [Jarome] Iginla lost in the finals, we tried to bring guys that have a winning culture, guys that have done something special somewhere else. That’s the type of player we like to bring. When we brought in [Blake] Comeau, it’s because we heard lots of good things about his character and he’s been very good in the room. Guys like [Cody] McLeod, Beauchemin and Comeau, they’re good leaders in this room, they’re talking, their voices inside is good and they’re doing a good job. I’d like to see it more from our core, I’d like to see some guys supporting [Gabriel Landeskog]. Is it going to be [Matt Duchene], is it going to be [Nathan] MacKinnon, [Tyson] Barrie, [Erik] Johnson, these guys have to step up, and this is how this team is going to get to another level.

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Roy complained earlier in the interview about the loss of Paul Stastny, but one would assume that additions like Jarome Iginla and Francois Beauchemin would offset that veteran departure.

Doug Pensinger/Getty Images

A more interesting omission was Ryan O’Reilly’s name; O’Reilly was part of Colorado’s young core and despite an ugly off-ice DUI incident this summer was named Buffalo’s Masterton Award nominee, with Mike Harrington of the Buffalo News calling him “a de facto captain in the locker room and on the ice” who “routinely stays on the ice after the club's regular workouts and leads many of his teammates in more extra skills drills after the coaches have left.”

O’Reilly shouldn’t have been nominated for the Masterton, but that sounds like the kind of support that Roy was pining for in the interview. And yet it was a management group that includes Roy himself (as vice president of hockey operations) who decided that O’Reilly was too expensive to keep and traded him prior to the start of the season.

More critically, Roy misses the big problem. The issue isn’t that Colorado loses too many close games; it’s that the Avalanche are so bad that they’re rarely in close games. Of the close games they play, they win more than they lose:

• Colorado’s record in games decided by one goal : 21-11-4 (0.583 win percentage, 6th in the NHL)
• Colorado’s record in games decided by more than one goal: 18-26-0 (0.409 win percentage, 23rd in the NHL)

The Avalanche win a higher percentage of their close games than the Chicago Blackhawks or Dallas Stars do. The trouble is that in blowouts Colorado’s record is basically identical to that of the Toronto Maple Leafs.

What Roy didn’t mention while citing problems in Colorado was that his team is outshot 32-27 in an average hour of five-on-five play, the worst figure in the entire league, or that the year before his arrival the team was basically breaking even on the shot clock and that it has gotten worse in that department relative to the rest of the league every single year he’s been coach.

A lack of leadership and character is one possible explanation for Colorado getting so badly thumped on the shot clock, but there are two problems with that. First, as coach, part of Roy’s job is to establish and maintain a healthy culture; if that isn’t in place after three years on the job, it’s hard to see how he can escape blame.

Rocky W. Widner/NHL/Getty Images

Second, if leadership is the issue, then Roy is letting a pretty key player off the hook. Of the team’s skill players, it isn’t Matt Duchene or Nathan MacKinnon who has the worst numbers, it’s veteran leader and proven winner Jarome Iginla, who in an average hour sees 33 opposition shots to just 26 for the Avalanche when he’s on the ice.

There’s another possibility, though, one that has little to do with leadership or goaltending or any of the other items that Roy identified in his interview.

It’s possible that, as he did with goaltending, Roy is both misdiagnosing the problem and blind to his own faults. The massive decline in Colorado’s five-on-five shot metrics started when Roy took over as coach and has continued year after year. It might be time for him to focus less on the mindset of his players and more on what he’s asking his players to do.

In other words, as Roy is looking here, there and everywhere trying to identify the problem, he might do well to take a moment and glance in a mirror.  

Statistics courtesy of NHL.com, Hockey-Reference.com and Stats.HockeyAnalysis.com. 

Jonathan Willis covers the NHL for Bleacher Report. Follow him on Twitter for more of his work.