DEL – What shortened the Eagles’ wings?

When DEL fans looked at the standings during november the Eagles from Mannheim were greeting from the top and it surely did not look like they had any intention to let anyone else slip past them. Most of the time the gap between Mannheim and whoever happened to be second on a given gameday was even more than 6 points - or in other words – at least two gamedays worth of a cushion.

Now we often hear that sports are a fast changing environment and the tides can turn quickly. It certainly happened for the Eagles in december. Starting with a 2-6 defeat in Berlin on december 4th, Mannheim went on to give up 8 consecutive games. What made things worse was that in only one of them they could score more than 2 goals, while being blanked on two occasions at home against Munich and in Düsseldorf last tuesday.

The only exception was a 4-5 shootout loss against Wolfsburg, that saw Mannheim switch on the red light 4 times. With the negative streak Mannheim slipped down into 5^th position already and as they have a few games more than most of their opponents, it might go further down in the next days.

Team manager Teal Fowler does not want to let the injury problems the team is facing be an excuse, although any team might get into offensive troubles when guys like Jamie Tardif, Glen Metropolit and Marcel Goc are missing. These guys also bring a lot of NHL experience to the team. Dennis Reul was also out and missing as a stay-at-home defender.

If injuries are not part of the problem, according to Fowler, where does it come from? He went on by stating that a lot of guys might have mental issues at the moment with scoring goals, sparking a debate whether coach Greg Ireland is still the right guy behind the Eagles bench. However Fowler guaranteed that Ireland will coach the team during next week's Spengler Cup in Davos.

This prestigious Cup in Switzerland might also have something to do with the situation. As the team will be out of league play for a week, some of their games had to be scheduled in earlier. And this was exactly the time in december, when injuries hit them and the negative streak began. Obviously this costs a lot of power and when you are not winning, it does not help to have more games in a quicker rhythm. So Mannheim got stuck in a kind of a vicious cirlce there.

The Eagles will see the Spengler Cup as a holiday from league sorrows for sure and should use the occasion to play without any pressure and respark the fire they had going during the first months of the DEL season. If this works out for them Greg Ireland will not have to worry about his job anytime soon since the team obviously has enough talent to be on top of the DEL.

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