Adam Keefe says he takes “full responsibility” for the Belfast Giants’ 5-0 playoff semi-final defeat to the Cardiff Devils.
Cardiff stunned the Giants in the opening semi-final of the Elite League’s Playoff Finals Weekend, with Cole Sanford (brace), Joey Martin, Zach O’Brien, and Josh MacDonald firing the Devils into the title showdown.
Belfast head coach Keefe spoke with reporters shortly after the final buzzer sounded at the Motorpoint Arena.
Here is every word the Canadian said.
Adam, how do you evaluate your team’s performance today?
I’m not going to talk poorly about my hockey team. I take full responsibility. I thought Pete [Russell] had Cardiff very well prepared for this do or die playoff game and clearly we weren’t [prepared]. It wasn’t our best performance, that’s for sure.
I thought Cardiff were very good, they did all of the little things right and once they took the lead, they didn’t give us very much.
This is a very weird league in the sense that everywhere else in the world, hockey is played with a best-of-seven series to win the playoff title. This is different, it’s structured like football, where finishing in first place is an absolute eight-month grind and I ultimately grinded them to the ground.
Ben Lake, Belfast Giants (Image: James Assinder)
I don’t think we had enough in ourselves to push through this weekend and because of that, we lost tonight. That’s frustrating and disappointing for our fans who travelled here and supported us all season long.
But, at the end of the day, we start the season with our goal being to win all three trophies and we fell just short of that. These guys grinded until the last minute of the very last league game and that’s a credit to them because they emptied the tank.
Maybe we emptied the tank a little bit too much and I take responsibility for that. But I won’t apologise for it either.
Looking at the season as a whole, how do you rate winning two out of the three available trophies?
I mean, there are a lot of highlights. There are a lot of ups and downs throughout every year and the Challenge Cup victory was one of them. We played Cardiff many times this season and had a lot of success against them, but every game was close and we were lucky enough to play them in that final when they were down bodies.
Pete has them playing very good hockey right now, they’re playing playoff-style hockey, and we fell short as a result of that.
Winning the Challenge Cup is a big achievement, it’s our first chance to win silverware and bringing the trophy back to Belfast was special for our fans and our group.
Winning the Elite League is the big one, it’s our Stanley Cup. It’s easy for everyone to have a laugh at the Belfast Giants right now, but we’re the team that was the most consistent for eight months and that’s why we get to call ourselves the league champions this summer.
I’m very proud of our guys this year and I’m very privileged to coach them.
Ultimately, we fell short of our goal to win the treble, but that takes nothing away from their efforts over the course of eight months.
As I said, this is a different league where you have to pick it back up after celebrating a title that took eight months to win. It sucks that we didn’t get it, but Cardiff took control of the game with the first goal and we couldn’t get back into it.
Did you have to change the team’s style of play today, moving away from a possession system to more of a chip and chase approach, due to end of season fatigue?
I wouldn’t say that we had to adjust, Cardiff made us play like that. They were on top of us, outskated us, and played a playoff-style hockey game. I take responsibility for that because I didn’t have us playoff-ready…
As I said, our standards are very high in this organisation. We fell two games short of a treble this year, and we’re certainly going to enjoy our double. But it’s disappointing and frustrating that our season ends this way.
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