Coyotes’ Shane Doan: Team pressed too hard during losing streak
Oct 16, 2013, 11:37 PM | Updated: 11:37 pm
With the Phoenix Coyotes’ early season road test now in the rear view mirror, team captain Shane Doan was able to reflect on the team’s struggles at the beginning and how they turned it around to get three big wins.
“Early on in the season I think everybody wants to prove to the coach that they’re going to work hard, and we take pride as a group, myself, everybody, as being a hard-working team,” Doan told Arizona Sports 620’s Burns and Gambo Wednesday. “You can overwork, you can overpursue. You have to stay disciplined and stay inside your system.”
Doan compared it to football when defensive linemen try so hard to reach the quarterback, they don’t stick to their assignments and it gives the offense room to run the ball. He said the team finally settled down in Detroit and they were able to get back to basics.
“It was one of those games where everyone took a deep breath and said, ‘I’m going to trust everyone around me and we’re going to do our jobs,'” Doan said. “And when we do our jobs, we’re a good team.”
The Coyotes won that game 4-2 and followed it up with a 2-1 victory in Philadelphia and a 5-3 win in Carolina. Though they were blown out in the first two games of the road trip, getting those three consecutive wins to close it out was a big accomplishment for the team.
“We played three games in three and a half days, in three different cities, in three time zones away,” Doan said. “That was a tough little stretch for us and it was big to get points in all of them.”
