After the Hawks won the Stanley Cup, I felt like they were a young team. They had a new coach who was the first person to teach them the game and a new general manager who was a bit young for the job.
The Hawks were young, but not young enough to keep their expectations down. After the Cup win, the Hawks began to think they had the goods, and a lot of that was based on their first win in years. So, they went into the offseason confident they could compete for a cup again. It didn’t work out that way, but that’s just the nature of sports.
The fact of the matter is though, the Hawks were young and had a lot of untapped talent, but they werent young enough to get a chance to compete for a championship. They may just as well have been 18 or 20. Thats just how sports works. In this case though, it wasnt the players who were the problem, it was the coaching. In the playoffs, they got a new coach who was a bit older and didn’t seem to know what he was doing.
This is the type of thing you’d expect when you have a young team coming off a good season. If you can’t compete with the best players (and a better coach), then you’ll find yourself on the outside looking in, hoping for a better season one year since you’re the only one who knows the new coach.
