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Wednesday, October 17, 2007
Waddell should be gone instead
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
Four years ago, Don Waddell sat behind his desk, pointed at the wall separating his office and Bob Hartley’s, and said, “My future’s in that room.”
I’m not sure what changed. But on Wednesday, a coach who has won a Stanley Cup and led a struggling franchise to its only playoff berth and a division title lost his job, while the general manager who has been here for over nine years, seven-plus seasons and no playoff wins is preparing to hire his third coach.
Don Waddell stays.
Bob Hartley goes.
What’s wrong with this picture?
Don Waddell, the general manager who has drafted 28 defensemen but has only two to show for it on the Thrashers’ roster, stays.
Bob Hartley, who has been trying to shuffle semi-comatose bodies in hopes that defective ingredients can somehow be made into a better soup, goes.
Hartley will get another job. But how does Waddell get another chance?
The Thrashers fired the wrong guy.
At the very least, Waddell should’ve stood up Wednesday and declared, “You know what? I really botched this off-season. Maybe Todd White isn’t a No. 1 center. So I resign.”
Instead, he said this: “I think we’re a better team when we started the season this year than we were last year.”
Everybody waited for the punch line.
The Thrashers figured to lose several pieces off of last year’s playoff team, which was swept in four games by the New York Rangers (tonight’s opponent — kismet!) What few imagined was that the Thrashers would come back so thin, with arguably the league’s worst depth chart at center, a thin and erratic group of defensemen, and no playmaker for Ilya Kovalchuk.
Some people have made way too much of a perceived feud between Hartley and Kovalchuk. The fact is, Kovalchuk told Waddell in the off-season that he’s fine with the coach. He just wanted a center. I dunno. Maybe Waddell misunderstood Kovalchuk, and thought Todd White was Russian for Peter Forsberg.
This is what Kovalchuk said Wednesday about Hartley: “He’s a straight-up guy. Whenever there was something wrong, he always said it to my face, and that’s what I like about him. … I just [told him], ‘Thank you.’ He really teach me a lot of good things, and I think he makes me a better player.”
Everybody else in the Thrashers’ locker room should be so stand up. There are two things this team needs: better players and more mirrors, because they just got a good coach and an even better man fired.
Waddell took heat for mortgaging the future with pre-deadline deals last year. He shouldn’t. Those deals got the Thrashers into the playoffs. But blame Waddell for the holes that existed before the trades, and the holes that remained unfilled after the season.
Player development has been dreadful. There is little to show for nine drafts and 82 players. Of the 28 defensemen drafted, the only two here are Garnet Exelby (eighth round, 1999; blind squirrel, meet acorn) and Tobias Enstrom (eighth round, 2003; just got here).
Michael Gearon, one of the owners, talked about the franchise’s incremental progress. But it doesn’t compare to Minnesota and Nashville. Tampa Bay won a Stanley Cup. Carolina, a transplant, was torn apart and built into a Cup team.
Beyond Kovalchuk, what do the Thrashers have to build around? Goalie Kari Lehtonen is talented but seemingly more fragile by the hour. Marian Hossa will be a free agent. (Good luck convincing him to stay.) Everybody else is either 1) young and unproven; 2) old and sliding; 3) just not that good.
But does Waddell regret any of his off-season decisions?
“We’re only six games into the year,” he said. “It’s way too early to start judging whether a player will be a valuable member of your team or not.”
Oh. So why is six games not too early to decide the fate of a coach?
“It’s how we lost games,” Waddell said.
Is Hartley blameless? No. This is the worst start in franchise history. This team obviously has underachieved. Some players didn’t like Hartley. Some probably were worn down by his message. But doesn’t that say something about the players and personalities that Waddell has assembled?
Bobby Holik said he “sensed a problem toward the end of last year. I told that to Don in our after-season meetings. The last third of the season and in the playoffs, we were not getting better.”
When Holik was asked if the problem was Hartley or the players, he said, “I guess the next few weeks will answer that.”
Gearon would not address Waddell’s job security beyond saying, “From our perspective, it’s important we see progress.”
It’s nice that there’s a standard. It would be nicer if everybody were held to it.
Permalink | Comments (154) | Categories: Jeff Schultz, Thrashers / NHL
Rockies proved ‘93 Braves choked
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
Upon further review, I was absolutely right about the Braves’ 1993 loss to the Philadelphia Phillies during the National League Championship Series.
It was a choke.
Remember? That physically challenged (OK, fat) and strikingly inferior Phillies team managed to reach the World Series in six games over a Braves bunch that had won two consecutive pennants and 104 games during that regular season to the 97 games of those Phillies.
To hear the Braves tell it, they just had nothing left for the Phillies, because they was so exhausted from spending the second half of the season chasing the San Francisco Giants in the NL West. As late as early August, the Braves trailed the Giants by nine games, but the Braves spurted to the division title after going 55-19 down the stretch.
Hmmmm.
Been following the Colorado Rockies lately?
The Rockies could do nothing less than win 13 of their last 14 games in September after facing elimination from a postseason berth three times during that stretch. After that, they needed to beat the San Diego Padres in a one-game playoff to make the postseason as a wild card.
The Rockies did. They were so (ahem) exhausted in the aftermath that they swept the Philadelphia Phillies in the division series, and then they swept the Arizona Diamondbacks in the NLCS.
Now the exhausted Rockies are in the World Series after winning 21 of their last 22 games.
So much for that exhaustion theory about the 1993 Braves.
Permalink | Comments (144) | Categories: Quick Hit, Terence Moore
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