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Deep Dive 01 | Burn The Tapes: QCC S73 Playoff Review
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locrianmidwestRegistered Senior Member
The sun now sets far too soon on the Quebec City Citadelles' encouraging season 73. I say encouraging because, well, it was! QCC is extremely young - over 60% of the skaters are rookies. Quebec was expected to be in the midst of a rebuild this season so to make it as far as we did was pretty cool! However, it's only the end of the first round of the playoffs in a matchup that we in all likelihood should have won (the Citadelles were 5-1 against Detroit in the regular season). Yet here I am writing this. So what happened? Well, the Citadelles in an almost exact reversal of their regular season fortunes fell to the Falcons in a decisive 5 games. This isn't going to be a game-by-game recap of the series because I'm pretty sure we all saw the final scores - this is going to be more of a look at the good and the bad of the Citadelles in their only postseason series this season.
It's best we get the bad out of the way first. Yours truly was... doing... cardio. Yeah. No excuses - no goals, no assists, -5. Not even my one weird quirk of winning faceoffs could save the performance here - abhorrent 35% winrate. Blegh. Obviously losing a series in 5 games is a surefire way to give up a decent few goals, but 3/4 of the Citadelles' postseason losses were by 3 goals or more. It's probably safe to say that the defense took a step back from the regular season; even with some good individual performances the highest +/- of any Citadelles skater was only 1. Additionally, 13/15 of the team's skaters share in negative plusminus. As much as it hurts to say, the goaltending also wasn't ideal. Beloved team staple Net Man in his final outings took a bit of a step back from his performance in the previous year's playoffs, though how much of this can be explained by variance or the team around him getting more inexperienced is hard to tell. Regardless, Net Man posted the third worst save percentage of goalies in the playoffs with an .870, which (unless you're Great Falls) isn't the kind of goaltending you can win a series with. While the series mostly consisted of one sided affairs in Detroit's favor, not every game was an foregone Falcons win. The Citadelles rode their volatility to the only win of the series to the tune of 6-1 in game 3 behind a hat trick from Jeff Hunziker! Team scoring in general was a huge strength through the series, with every forward minus one notching a goal and only two defensemen (*sigh*) not getting at least an assist. Rookie darling Celeste Desjardins did not disappoint, putting up 4 goals and 2 assists as well as a team-leading 1 in plusminus (especially impressive considering their well documented aversion to defense)! Other notable offensive contributors this series came from Jeff Hunziker and Ryland Murphy, who put up 7 points each. As I said, defensively the team was rough but there were some nice things to say about that too. Leo Roze in particular I credit with consistently putting their body on the line, blocking more shots (19) than any player on both the Citadelles or the Falcons during the contest. Another interesting takeaway was that the Citadelles didn't really take many penalties. Only 4 skaters took a penalty and even of the four, only 12 PIM were accrued teamwide. Thinking about it a little bit more though, it's not great that the disparity was that big when taking into account the disparity in PIMs. Detroit had twice as many PIMs as Quebec, but they both had the same amount of power play points which means that the Falcons were far more efficient about converting their chances. While not taking penalties is always a good thing, look a bit closer and you find more of a mixed bag. Something to work on. This series was a pretty good indicator of where QCC will be soon. The team's scoring shows flashes of brilliance and they're able to keep themselves out of the penalty box, but the defense is very outclassed and certain people I could name *cough* (me) *cough* need to step it up next season. This will not be the last you see from Quebec. The owls will return... [WC: 750]
chetibRegistered Posting Freak |
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