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Sunday, December 11, 2005
Multiple personalties collide on ice again
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
A team takes a 3-0 lead. The other team scores four straight. The first team rallies to win in a shootout. Spin central refers to this as the “new NHL.” Not sure if the “H” still sounds for hockey or hooey. But I digress.
It’s no excuse. The new NHL is all about 5-on-4 or 4-on-3 or anything but 5-on-5. But the lack of flow that defines the sports now doesn’t full explain what has happened to the Thrashers. Or, more accurately, what hasn’t happened to the Thrashers.
Hockey is a free flow game. “Systems” are another way of saying, “When the puck is at point A, we do this. When the puck moves to point B, we do that.” But it has little in the way of set plays or structure.
But what teams can have, even in today’s NHL, is an identity. The Thrashers don’t have one. They have 12. They are Sybil on skates.
They opened Sunday’s game at home by falling behind 3-0 to the Chicago Blackhawks, who haven’t won a Stanley Cup since 1961 and might not win it again until 2061. Then they rallied to take a 4-3 lead only to fall in a shootout.
Here’s the rose-colored perspective: The Thrashers earned a point in the standings, giving them three out of a possible four in the past two games. Despite the team’s injury problems in goal, they aren’t close to playoff extinction with more than half the season to go.
Here’s real life: From period to period, from game to game, we still don’t know what to expect.
It’s not about the goaltending. It’s not about the blur of power plays and penalty killing situations. It’s about a team of players not having developed any sort of playing personality through 31 games.
That’s on the coach. Bob Hartley has been asked often about his team’s consistency problems. More often than not, like Sunday, he points to the rule changes. But it’s on him to make five players on the ice actually look like they’re on the same team.
“Unfortunately for coaches, you see a lot of games like this,” he said.
“You don’t know what kind of flow you’re going to get. It’s going to take weeks. Maybe it’s going to take months, it’s going to take years. The players are making huge efforts, but you still see plenty of hooking, holding and tripping. Why? Because that’s the way we taught them how to play for the last 15 or 20 years.”
But that doesn’t explain everything. It doesn’t explain trailing Chicago 3-0 after 12 minutes.
Sometimes the Thrashers look like a force. Sometimes they drift. Sometimes you witness both ends of the spectrum in a two-minute span.
There is little to their game right now that says, “This is who we are and what we do.” Because right now, guessing which direction the Thrashers will go is like anticipating the direction of a whiffleball when it’s thrown into the wind gust.
“I don’t know how to explain it, but I know the problem has to be fixed right in this room,” Bobby Holik said. “The thing is, we know how to play every game. We’re just not doing that. Words are cheap. Obviously we have a problem. A serious problem.”
Holik has been part of the problem. He admits it. A Chicago player went around him, leading to the first goal of the game. Holik came back to deliver some vicious checks and won a key face off to set up a goal by Ilya Kovalchuk near the end of the period.
But Holik was signed to be a force and prevent lulls like the one the team has been in. He was minus-2 Sunday, and is now a minus-12 on the season, worst among the team’s forwards.
“I feel a lot of responsibility — I’m a big part of it,” he said. “But we’re all looking for the exact formula to be consistent.”
The rules aren’t changing. So the team has to.
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