Todd Dutiaume says he’s ready to make changes to the Fife Flyers roster after seeing his team slip to their fourth successive defeat over the weekend.

Flyers lost both games of their double-header against Sheffield Steelers to drop to fifth in the table and Dutiaume was particularly unhappy with Sunday’s performance on home ice.

“I think that it’s pretty apparent by now that there’s going to have to be at least a change or two in our line-up,” Dutiaume told Flyers TV.

“We have gone through cycles like this in the past and what we identified was that sometimes the only way through to people is to show them how serious you really are.

“Make no bones about it, my bosses, myself and my assistant coach want this team to succeed.

“It’s not a holiday camp, but I get a sense with this team that sometimes we figure we will show up just to do enough and that’s not good enough.

“I think the message is clear that guys are going to need to start fighting for their jobs. If we came out tonight with a jump in our step we would have found ourselves in a hockey game, but it took until midway through the second period before we saw a little bit of life.

“I’m going to have to painfully watch the game tape again, but my impression was that we wanted to cheat, cut corners and be passengers in this hockey game.

“For that first period and a half, I don’t even think guys had checked in at that point which is just incredibly disappointing, since in my position I would feel that you might actually be playing for your job and showing the people who pay your wages that you have a heartbeat and you care.

“That wasn’t the case tonight, and I think that any time we did get the puck we panicked.

“They could use any excuse that they want tonight, that they’re short, that we’ve been struggling with injuries, but we had a full complement of ‘D’ men back there tonight – it was pretty disappointing.”

(Image permission: Fife Flyers)