Scratch and Win?

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So as you may or may not know, Tyson Barrie has been scratched for the last couple of games, and will be scratched for the next few it looks like. We here at Avaholics Unanimous understand that when a team is finally starting to gel and put up some points, you don’t want to fix anything that isn’t broken. That’s fine. But what the Avs management, mostly Joe Sacco, is doing to Barrie is wrong. Sacco said Barrie was going to be scratched before the 2^nd game of the home and home versus Chicago. His reasoning: the last 2 games, Barrie’s level of play had dropped. That’s fair. You want to ice your best players all the time. But it certainly isn’t doing Barrie any favours. Here is our theory:

Tyson Barrie is a young kid playing in the NHL  on a team with 8 defensemen on its active roster. He is  the only one as of right now that is eligible to skip waivers before being sent down to the minors. That makes him expendable and the most likely to see his time in “The Show” this season cut short. That is a lot of pressure to put on a youngster.

Look at it this way; we have all been in the position before where we make a mistake at our jobs, get yelled at, and then go back to work. Only when we go back to work, we are often so afraid to make another mistake that we end up screwing up on a ton of different stuff. We aren’t sport psychologists, but we don’t see how this would be any different on Barrie. His NHL job security is at risk, and any time he makes a few mistakes (which he is going to do for pete’s sake) he gets taken out of the lineup. We can’t help but think that if Sacco gave him more leeway and didn’t punish him for a bad game, Barrie’s overall play would be more relaxed, more confident, and just better. Remember when EJ and Wilson went down, and Barrie was put back into the lineup earlier in the year? He was one of our best defensemen on most nights and he was playing great. You could see he was confident, knew it was okay to slip up a few times, and knew the possibility of him getting scratched was low. Bottom line, he knew he could just go out and play.

So what happens? He has a few “bad games”, guys get healthy, and he sits. Good strategy coach. Because the best way to develop a budding 21 year old defenseman is to have him watch games up in the press box. If and when he returns to the lineup it will be interesting to see if he plays well with the microscope examining his every play. It seems like Sacco isn’t looking for reasons to keep him in the lineup, he is looking for reasons to scratch him.

Oh and a little side note, in his last 3 games against Columbus, Detroit, and Chicago, Barrie averaged just under 21 minutes of ice time, picked up an assist, was +1 with 7 shots, had 4 hits and a couple of blocked shots. That doesn’t seem so bad.

Ryan O’Byrne in his last 3 games you ask? About 20 minutes ice time, -2, a bad penalty, and multiple untimely icings. Hm.