5 GAME RETROSPECTIVE - 34-38

Hey there, remember OHB? It's been a while! I'm not a New Year's resolutions kind of guy, but if I had any, they would have gone out of the window immediately with these first few weeks. Travelling back and straight into frenetic work in the first week was one thing; getting turned into a husk of a human by flu in the second was quite another! Now, I don't play Dark Souls-type games, as being a teacher is more than enough for me in terms of impossible difficulty (I'll judiciously avoid any analogy between the bosses of those games and mine), but I do feel my humanity has been restored, so let's get back to it with a 5 game retrospective before we recommence the final push in the ICE League.

https://imgur.com/gallery/ZOdKRs0/comment/52687047/1

Ah yes, talking of the league, we won the Slovene Cup. Not to be the classic negative British man, but I really find the victory laps we've taken over beating Jesenice quite embarrassing. It's like furiously celebrating watching a pro boxer beat up an old lady - I find it in poor taste, and I'm only half-joking. We're acting like we've done something worthy and we haven't. All we did is just not lose to a team that we should never lose to. The state of SLOHOKEJ outside of us is parlous, to say the least, so I don't know why we're busting out the branded "PRVAKI!!!" caps. Euro Hockey Hub advised me to consider covering more of Slovene hockey - any advice from Mark is gold dust, so of course I considered it. Not for very long, though - there doesn't seem to be much else here at the senior level!

This should have been a Mario Balotelli postman quote type of deal - get the job done and move on without unnecessary fanfare. A bit like the Florida Panthers, CC's old team, when they win the Eastern Conference. Those guys don't even touch the trophy, as it's not the one they really want. Slightly different context here, but I would prefer that extremely evident 'job's not done' attitude. Still, someone could argue that we're unlikely to win the ICE League, so we have to celebrate the trophy we do acquire. I am not that person, though 😆

Me looking for any half-decent adult hockey in Slovenia outside of OLL

(I'd rather watch ZG's beer league than Jesenice, any day of the week)

https://tenor.com/en-GB/view/pulp-fiction-confused-travolta-where-lost-gif-5308454

Of course, it's fine with me that there's not much else on offer at the senior level here, as I am happy covering Olimpija alone. But we should heed our lonely echo in the valley of the shadow of the death of Slovene pro hockey outside of Ljubljana and avoid over-celebrating what is a mercy killing, at best. I worry that this kind of nothing-burger trophy win will lull us into a false sense of security that will see us get blasted in the playoffs, but allow us to turn around and say 'well, we achieved/won something this season'. We haven't. The club are happy with automatic playoffs; I think with the investment we've made and how our previous two seasons have gone, it has to be winning a playoff series as well. 

This is a decent representation of what I fear over-celebrating the Slovene Cup might do to us in the actual competition that matters:

https://imgflip.com/memegenerator/253740962/9th-place-guy-celebrating

To be fair, the ladies I watch play handball, RK Krim, also absolutely pulverise their opposition in their version of the Slovene Cup. I just don't see the point of even participating in this kind of thing, to be quite honest. Let the other essentially amateur teams duke it out and just auto-award us and Krim the championship, if this is the level of competition. I would be absolutely fine with Jesenice relinquishing the pretence that they can keep going at the senior level and simply becoming a junior team, as that seems to be a more thriving area of SLOHOKEJ, thereby saving us the trouble of the faintly farcical Slovene Cup every year. 

Granted, I am not Slovene and therefore do not have the full context of the situation, nor the fire and fury of hatred against Jesenice - but that's mainly because I consider them entirely irrelevant. I don't like Maribor one bit and I barely even follow the football version of Olimpija. You should have seen my disgust when I saw some guy wearing a purple Maribor t-shirt on the Dragon Bridge last year!

Anyway, you can see that I've missed expressing my opinions, so let's get off this rant and on to the previous 5 games. Don't worry, it's not worth doing a quintuple set of full-blown reports at this stage, so a nimble overview will have to suffice. 

VIENNA 3-2 OLIMPIJA

Did we play CC's style? YES/NO/SORT OF

Did the other team significantly impede our ability to play CC's style? YES/NO/SORT OF

Did the other team play better than us? YES/NO/SORT OF

Did we win? YES/NO

Main takeaway: One player can win a game - Vienna's hat-trick hero scored more than we did. In all seriousness, this was a tight game and it could have gone either way at the end. Euro Hockey Hub, who lives in Vienna and goes to their games, said they have improved a lot since their coaching change, so we shouldn't view this overly negatively (even if we still keep dropping away games). Vienna grabbed the chances we gave them with both hands, while we were unable to do the same.

Goals: Quince and Mahkovec.

GRAZ 2 - 0 OLIMPIJA 

Did we play CC's style? YES/NO

Did the other team significantly impede our ability to play CC's style? YES/NO

Did the other team play better than us? YES/NO 

Did we win? YES/NO  

Main takeaway: We were quite unlucky with our bounces this game (Quince's deflection going through the goalie's legs and clipping the post, for instance), but sport is like that sometimes. We kept it close against another Austrian team who are looking good under their changed-coach. Yet, it was another away loss and Graz largely shut our offense down in what was a pretty depressing game to watch in my airport hotel room.

OLIMPIJA 5 -1 FERENCVAROS

Did we play CC's style? ABSOLUTELY/YES/NO

Did the other team significantly impede our ability to play CC's style? YES/NO/NOT AT ALL

Did the other team play better than us? YES/NO/NOPE LOL 

Did we win? YES/NO  

Main takeaway: FTC were bad in this game, but that doesn't preclude us from being good, too. It was really nice to be spotting impressive moments proliferating across the team for the first time in a while (e.g. Kapel's vigorous forecheck). I felt bad for FTC's monk goalies (both did the monk pose, maybe it's a Hungarian thing, praying to Attila). The scoreline could have been closer, though, as FTC improved as the game went on. Horak was the difference there, as per usual. Finally, it was nice to see TJ break his goalless streak.

Goals: Brennan, Pance, Simšič, Mahkovec x2.

SALZBURG 5 - 1 OLIMPIJA 

https://imgflip.com/memegenerator/363114678/giant-vs-warrior

Did we play CC's style? YES/NO/WE DIDN'T GET THE CHANCE TO PLAY ANYTHING REALLY

Did the other team significantly impede our ability to play CC's style? YES/NO

Did the other team play better than us? YES/NO 

Did we win? YES/NO  

Goals: Mašič.

Main takeaway: It was hard to judge how we played in this one, as RBS controlled the game so effectively from P2 onwards. With 12 Ws in a row, shall we just give them their 5th consecutive title already? ED did point out we are 2-1 up on them on the season, but it won't matter if we are trending down while they heat up to be red-hot just in time for the playoffs. We scored a gorgeous PP goal, but that was the only time we opened them up. Everything else was a clinic by RBS in keeping attacks to the outside and making space to shoot into at the other end. This was a sobering loss to take after dismantling FTC in the previous game. As the saying goes, sometimes you get your eyes opened to the different levels in sport. On this evidence, we seem to be firmly in between FTC and RBS, which doesn't leave us in a powerful pose for the playoffs.

Interviews:

Mašič mid-game: the key points are the same as always: good forecheck, force turnovers, quick strike from there.

Halbert post-game: (interviewer said 'thanks for coming', which is a classic cricketing chirp in the UK for when you haven't done anything during the game) "They played well and we didn't. They forechecked well. We have to look in the mirror, that's the way you win championships. We need to regroup and play 60 mins, can't get by only playing the last 10 minutes - it's too late then. 

Teams took us a bit lightly to start the season, now they're taking us seriously. We're not getting any freebies anymore. We have to turn up every game in these last 10 before the playoffs. Maybe we haven't been doing that every time."

OHB comment: I appreciated Halby's candour in this. I found his comment about the early successes of OLL under CC being down to other teams not taking us seriously. Is that slightly damning of Coach Cooper's turnaround? That it only works when teams don't bother to prepare extensively for us? I don't think that's what he really meant, but it sort of came out that way.

Olimpija 4 - 1 Linz

Did we play CC's style? YES/NO

Did the other team significantly impede our ability to play CC's style? YES/NO

Did the other team play better than us? YES/NO/DEFINITELY NOT

Did we win? EMPHATICALLY/YES/NO 

Goals: Mahkovec, Brennan, Meyer, Pance. 

Main takeaway: Finally, we found a way to treat Linz as they are - a weaker team that we should dominate. Once more, we let Horak down for his shutout attempt. 

Overall takeaways + Outlook for the final 10 games

• OHB and ED/SS are both right about Kolin. 
• I accept their hypothesis (yes, we are going to use that word for this) that I should view Kolin more neutrally at this stage. On reflection, I was conflating his current game with his potential, when I called him 'very good'. What he is right now is either 'neutral' or 'good', as ED and SS separately posit.
• However, I feel I am still correct to assign a lot of the blame to the team defence in front of him. As you see above (and as NR agrees), the team does not tend to play better defence in front of Horak. He is just better at papering over the cracks in the defence than Kolin, at this stage. You can see that in his Herculean efforts to get shutouts, only to keep getting let down late on. 
• So, I concede that I need to adjust my view of Kolin down somewhat, but I also remain steadfast in my belief that our system's commit-it-all approach to the OZ does not help our goalies when it inevitably breaks down into chances against. Thus, we should not be overly harsh in our judgement of Kolin.
• The chatter in the OLL community about bringing in a veteran goalie for next year, e.g. Slovenia's Pintarić, currently in the French league, is interesting. I still believe in Kolin, but I can't deny that being loaned out to a team in a weaker league to be their no.1 goalie would be good for his development. Having a more consistent option as Horak's backup would be helpful, too. It's a tough one, but if they have the ability to pull it off, I think it could work out for everyone. I still firmly believe in Kolin, but I think even he would admit he would rather be playing more games and experiencing less of this rollercoaster ride of backup appearances, either lauded or reviled at the flip of a coin behind Olimpija's porous defence.
• The team have already identified that we need to be better road warriors in away games going forward. Being good at home is very helpful, but as you'll see in the NHL playoffs, teams that can't win on the road don't tend to go very far. Taking ZG's suggestion to arrive early and stay overnight for away games could help with our performances, with the very basics of energy levels and mental preparedness. Sometimes it's the basics that make the difference, as Coach Cignetti has shown with his incredible success, taking Indiana from worst to first in college American Football by focusing on the fundamentals. https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6915590/2025/12/29/indiana-football-curt-cignetti-rose-bowl/
• In terms of our outlook, we seem to have 6th place pretty much locked up (OLL G38/65pts, AVS G39/54pts, FTC G40/50pts) - especially if we shut the door on the Huns, as the Romans couldn't, with our games against AVS and FTC tonight and tomorrow. 
• Who we will end up playing, I am not sure. I would take anyone but Pustertal. A fresh start in the playoffs, without the HCP monkey on our backs, would be my main goal. We have beaten all the teams above us at least once this season. Any of them is fine... Just not HCP. I can't take another knockout from them, 3 years running. 
• Do I think we can win a playoff series? I think we can win games, but it's hard to say about a series. Which OLL is going to turn up? Is it the one that fully embodies CC's vision for the team, with rampant offensive possession and high-scoring? Or is it the one that gets lost chasing the mirage of that vision, leaving us with the same leaky defence but without the goals at the other end? Will we see both in the same series? Olimpija's inconsistency is making my confidence in my ability to properly judge the team waver. Teams will always have ups and downs, as CC and others have pointed out. Those teams, like RBS, tend to have a stronger identity that they stick to for longer than we seem to be able to. Whatever the case, it won't be long until we see the proof in the pudding.