A Few Good Defencemen

I sent a text to one my friends tonight asking "if a coach goes so far as to play 5 defencemen on the power play to make a statement, how long until he gets fired?" My friend is on a work assignment in the middle of nowhere without Internet or television. He texted me back "he should get fired after the game, who did it?"

One of the Sutter brothers in Calgary put 5 D on his Power Play, and as it happens his brother is his boss and a former coach of the team. It is an original idea. I had never heard of or even thought of that idea before. There is no practical advantage to putting 5 D on the ice with a man advantage. Does that motivate your team, or is it a desperate move to fix something that is fundamentally broken? If you are a coach and your team can't produce enough offense to win, so you get desperate and pull a stunt to get attention, does that fix problem? Or if it got so bad that you had to do this, you should be fired for not doing your job in the first place...