AJC > Sports > Columnists > Archives > 2006 > April > 19 > Entry
DEL.ICIO.USlack of defense was Thrashers’ demise
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Wendy Parker
Sunrise, Fla. — The Thrashers were one period short of making Tuesday the biggest night in their existence. Instead it became just another final game — an overtime loss, not that it mattered — in another failed season, and the adjective, while cruel, is nonetheless apt. “As a team, we said before the season that if we didn’t make the playoffs it would be a failure,” said Scott Mellanby, the captain. “We still feel that way.” This team expected to make the playoffs. Its general manager guaranteed it would make the playoffs. Instead this becomes the most gifted aggregation that won’t be chasing the Stanley Cup. “This has been the toughest year,” general manager Don Waddell said. “There was so much pressure. This is tough to swallow.” It is. But missing the playoffs shouldn’t be seen as cause for the guarantor to be canned and his blueprint wadded up. Much of what Waddell envisioned the Thrashers being has come to fruition. They can score with anybody. (“We built this as an offensive team,” he said, telling no lies.) Some tweaking, however, seems in order. Put simply, the Thrashers have overcommitted to offense. Of their half-dozen best players, only one — Niclas Havelid — is a defenseman. “We have to think about committing more resources to the back end,” said Waddell, and spending big money on a big-ticket defensemen is something this franchise hasn’t yet done. For the Thrashers to become a bona fide Cup contender, that needs to happen ASAP. A more imposing backline would make it easier on those nights the No. 1 goalie cannot go. It would have been nice if Kari Lehtonen had played 58 games, as opposed to 38, but the Thrashers sometimes seemed unwilling to modulate their style to accommodate Lehtonen’s understudies. Some nights — Monday in Washington, for example — it’s necessary to nurse a one-goal lead through the final 20 minutes, to rely on those old-time hockey virtues of checking and defending. Instead the game got wild, as happened in Pittsburgh back in October (a 4-0 lead became a 7-5 defeat) and in Los Angeles in January (a come-from-ahead 8-6 loss). When you miss the playoffs by the skinniest of margins, you wind up fixating on squandered points. As Waddell noted, “We can win games 5-4 and 6-5,” but the trouble with high-scoring games is that weird things can happen at the end. The Thrashers need to take their lead from Archie Bell and (ahem) tighten up. Apparently assuming their offensive prowess would bail them out, they developed a penchant for falling behind — they trailed in the second period of Games 79, 80 and 81 — even as they were making their playoff surge. What this team must grasp is that inherent scoring skill will work just as well in a 3-2 game as in a 6-5 careen-a-thon. Internally the Thrashers believe that, had Lehtonen not gotten hurt, they’d have been one of the East’s top seeds, and perhaps they would. But the cold truth is that this team still coulda/shoulda made the playoffs. It had the talent. Sorry to say, it didn’t quite have the mesh. “When we had everybody healthy, we could run with anybody,” Waddell said, and maybe that was this team’s undoing. Maybe it focused overmuch on skating and scoring, occasionally misplacing its attention to detail. Over a 6 1/2-month regular season, that small failing wound up being the difference between adjourning after the 82nd game and flying north to open a first-round series Friday night. To their credit, the Thrashers gave it a go at the end. Said Waddell, pride in his voice: “We’ve been playing Game 7s the last three weeks.” But next season there will be no distinction in merely coming close. Next season the Thrashers cannot fall a game short or a point short. Next season they have to play their way into May. Toward that end, did the GM have any guarantees for 2007? “Don’t get me started with that one,” said Waddell, the pain of one broken promise still too new and too raw.
Permalink | |
