[quote name='Magicking610']Anyone going to be on early tonight? If it's possible, I want to go into practice for a little bit so that I don't feel as unorganized as last night.[/QUOTE]
Magic, the way you played last night had nothing to do with the rest of the team or being "unorganized". Your recognition was terrible. A lot of the time, you held onto the puck too long and got crushed or you forced a pass toward center ice when 2-3 defenders were inbetween. When you play decent teams, they're going to do that to you. As I've said to others, we can't just go around looking for the worst teams to play all night. You have to learn how to handle the good teams. If you're at all predictable, they're going to pick up on it.
One of the big things you kept doing (which Alan pointed out) was carrying the puck into the zone and then stopping almost immediately after the blue line. The IDEA of this play isn't bad because many teams will expect you to keep charging ahead to look for the cross crease. But when you pull up that early, it bunches everybody up at the blue line because your other two forwards are just making it into the zone behind you and your defensemen are out of the play completely.
On that play, you've either got to drive into the zone further or just dump the puck. Alan suggested even drop passing it and continuing forward (as though you still have the puck) to see if the defenders will follow you. Just ANYTHING other than a predictable forced centering pass or allowing them to destroy you and take the puck away (see also: turnover).
Also, your passing in general was AWFUL last night. I know you're aware of this as you even pointed out that your "passing detection" was off. You've just got to aim better...simple as that. It's not like we were running specific plays where you didn't know where we were going to be. There were times when you wanted to pass to someone to the right of you and the pass went backward. That's just paying attention and knowing what you're doing.
Making bad passes hurts your teammates because it takes away our scoring chances. When that kind of stuff happens, it feels like we need three possessions to get a good scoring chance while our opponent only needs one. This is part of the reason the "old CAG team" used to lose a lot of games. The more mistakes we make, the greater our chance of losing is (kinda common sense).
Everyone has bad days. That's no big deal. But you can't keep making the same mistakes game after game. Everybody has to recognize the things they do that don't work and try to fix them. Otherwise, people aren't going to want to play with you. That's basically the situation for everybody on the team.
I'll be on tonight (probably not early though) because I'm going out of town this weekend and will be gone all of next week. So, I'll be up for playing if people want to.
