Ahead of Saturday’s game against Carolina, Sheldon Keefe discussed the decision to healthy scratch David Kampf.
You mentioned that you weren’t happy with the mistakes made at the wrong time leading to goals. What do you do as a coach when players who don’t normally make mistakes make mistakes? How do you keep them accountable?
Keefe: There are a couple of different things. Mistakes are inevitable. Our sport and our league is a game of mistakes. If players don’t make mistakes, there would be no goals scored. I don’t care how good the players are, there would be no goals if there weren’t mistakes.
Sometimes, the other team forces you into mistakes. Sometimes, shit happens, you lose an edge, and fall down, which happened on our first goal the other night. Sometimes, you make mental mistakes or you are just making life easier on our opponent.
I thought we had too many of [the latter] last night. We had the “shit happens” type moments; you can outscore those and deal with some of those when you are scoring at the rate that we are. But the other ones, we have to do a better job of. That is really the focus.
There needs to be some accountability. David Kampf is going to be a scratch tonight. In my opinion, he just didn’t do a good enough job in some of those moments I am talking about as a guy that we really rely on in those positions, especially when we are playing with leads.
He is a really important player for us and will be important for us. He has been good here in the last little while, but there have been too many of those types of things. A guy like him — who we have come to really trust and rely upon — needs to be able to come through and lead the way for us in that department.
It is unlike you to punish players like this for their mistakes. What is the difference this time with Kampf?
Keefe: It is not specific to Kampf. You go through it, you try to be patient, you try to trust your guys, and you try to give them opportunities to go back out and do right. But the tolerance for the same types of mistakes that are happening when we are in positions of late is going to be a lot less. It needs to be a lot less if we don’t see improvement. That is the reality of it.
The other side of it: We have a young guy in Holmberg who has played well for us and hasn’t played for a while. He will get an opportunity tonight.
Was it due to Kampf’s giveaway before the game-tying goal by Adam Fantilli in Columbus?
Keefe: That was one of them. That and the line change, yeah.
Is the scratching of Kampf a message to the group?
Keefe: I guess you could call it a message to the group. There is going to be less tolerance for that. We have to get better in this area. That is it.
In particular, members of our leadership group — as David is — we trust to lead the way for us. The expectations are higher. Kampf, specifically, has to be a leader on that line. He has to be a leader in those types of situations where we are in control of the game.
It is obviously not just him. It is the guys that we really rely on to be good in those areas, whether you are the top guys who produce a lot of offense — we need those guys to be good in these areas as well, of course — but for someone like Kampfer, in particular, that is his job. That is his primary job and focus when he is on the ice. When he strays from that, he opens up opportunities for others to take his minutes.
In these moments, it must be helpful to have competition on the roster hungry for minutes.
Keefe: For sure. It is part of having a little more roster flexibility right now with the injuries, the cap, and such. You can make these sorts of decisions. It is also because we have a young player in Holmberg who we believe in. We have some others with the Marlies, too, who we think are pushing for their opportunities.
These are just little details that we need to be better in. We played a good hockey game last night. It was mistakes like the ones we described earlier that we have to manage better.
Tonight is going to be an entirely different hockey game and an entirely different challenge. We will turn the page on last night, but we do think we need to grow as a team within this.
Do the players hold each other accountable?
Keefe: They do. Players talk a lot. We have grown a lot in that area. We have a lot of new players on the team this year who are more comfortable now. The group itself is more cohesive in that area and comfortable with one another. Certainly, within our leadership group, we have grown a lot in that area over the years.
What will it be like to go up against a player of Michael Bunting’s type?
Keefe: He plays with lots of energy and all of that. It will be different. I haven’t seen a lot of him playing in Carolina this season, but we do know what to expect.
I think he fits in very well with how they want to play as a team. They are in your face, competitive, and around the net creating chaos all over. To that end, he fits in well.
With this team, you get four lines of that.
