I'm pretty confident, without looking, that the comment threads last year in a busy playing week wouldn't have been limited to a handful of comments, as they seem to be now. We had a team that was vastly outperforming its analytics and that stoked a pretty fierce debate.

Last year also capped a pretty crappy overall period of meh results, meh decision making by management and coaches, and an overall meh team trend for the last number of years.

Over the summer, I got pretty excited. Dorion diplomatically took care of some pretty bad leftover chores from his predecessor and former boss. Boucher really had me amped for the season. Overall, the mood here seemed pretty optimistic too, with many including me predicting career years for everyone, including the stickboy.

So now, we are the magical six weeks in. We have some personnel issues, including one that many were hoping wouldn't happen but probably expected to in Clarke McArthur. Lazar's stint in Bingo may have helped him - we will see - but he certainly didn't set hearts a flutter down there. And Brassard's arrival with his magical left hand pass has not ignited Ryan. If anything, it would appear that Ryan has snuffed out Brassard's abilities.

PK really solid, PP in the dumpster. Better overall team structure and an improving shots against trend extinguished by recent flare ups in shots against. EK65 showing he can be a defensive d-man, and Boro coming up with unexpectedly ok numbers. Ceci and Phaneuf are still a question mark.

Given what I believe have been some pretty solid management choices and moves, I truly believe we have reason to be positive about the future choices made. But do the players we have take us where we want to go? In other words, is this 6 week period of indoctrination in the new system enough of an indicator that we have personnel issues? I didn't think we were so thin up front, but maybe we are. And in the rear, is it simply a true number 2 in order to drop everyone down a slot, or is it more than that?