Gilmour the Great said:
You're free to disagree all you want but you're still not actually making a case for Randy Carlyle's coaching simply by saying that the team exceeded some sort of commonly assumed expectation.
Two people, for instance, specifically mentioned the improved penalty killing as something Carlyle should get credit for. But right now the Leafs have 10 players who have played in 10+ games and are averaging more than a minute per game on the penalty kill. Of those 10 players, 6 are new to the team this year. Does Randy Carlyle deserve credit for the fact that Jay McClement is a good penalty killer? What is he actually doing that's yielding improved results?
The reality is that expectations are often wrong for all sorts of reasons. Does Carlyle deserve the credit for the improved goaltending? If so, why? What has he done? Or Kadri? Because I think most people would say that the improvement in net and surprises like Kadri are the reason this team are doing better than a Lot of people thought they were.
A ton of things go into a team's season and people's expectations are often wrong. The Leafs have completely turned their roster over in the last four years. Why in the world would anything before those last four years be factored into the equation? Why would a coach get credit for an improvement based on a change in personnel?
Again, I'm not necessarily saying Carlyle doesn't deserve the credit for these things but I think we need to at least
attempt to explain what it is in Carlyle's coaching that is yielding these results before we just decide that any gaps between what we expect and what happens is a result of coaching. We may not be X's and O's guys but we can do better than "B followed A, therefore A caused B".
