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Saturday, January 31, 2009
The worst stretch of a bad season
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Two black marks on a door outside the Thrashers locker room at the RBC Center Saturday night showed just how frustrating it is to play for Atlanta’s NHL team these days. Someone, I’m told it was Ilya Kovalchuk, slammed a stick against the door. He cares. Kari Lehtonen cares, as anyone watching him and his 38 saves could see. In fact, I think most of the Thrashers care. They just don’t seem to play that way lately most of the time.
“We got no effort,” Kovalchuk said after Saturday’s 2-0 loss to the Hurricanes. “We practice hard. We do everything in practice, but we don’t show up in the games. If not for Kari, we’re going to get another blowout [loss]. It’s unacceptable. I don’t know. It’s bad. You lose every game, it feels awful.”
The Thrashers got outshot 21-4 in the first period. They fell behind 4-0 in the first period against the Islanders Thursday night and 1-0 in the first period against the Stars Tuesday night and 2-0 in the first period against the Flyers in the last game before the All-Star break. They lost all four games.
“We talked about getting ready,” coach John Anderson said. “We’re so fragile. We have one or two bad shifts, it’s like we’re so worried about our own zone we don’t chase pucks down. We just collapse. We don’t chase pucks down. We’re so worried about the front of the net we don’t go after loose pucks in our zone, and we get hemmed in.”
Anderson has a point. Remember the victory in Nashville, the game that turned into a laugher for the Thrashers? It started with the Thrashers pinned in their zone and turned only after Eric Perrin took advantage of a Predators miscue to score a goal against the run of play. The Thrashers used to look better than their 29th-place record. Lately, though, they’ve often looked as if they’ve accepted that 29th-place identity. It’s as if they’ve been beaten so often they take the ice expecting to lose, and when something bad happens they see that as confirmation. That doesn’t bode well for the next two-plus months.
It’s really hard to get a team with a low self-image to believe, and it’s really hard to get a team that doesn’t believe to win. Oh, I think they’ll have some nights when things go right and they look good and they wind up on top, but it’s very hard to see that happening often. And when some of the better players start disappearing at the trade deadline, the victories are likely to be further and further apart.
Ron Hainsey estimated the Thrashers played 15 or 16 of the first 20 minutes in their zone. Not only did that lead to a 2-0 deficit on the scoreboard, but it also tired out the team so much they didn’t have much left the rest of the game.
“It seemed like they had all the energy,” Hainsey said of the first period, and he said the breakdowns were bigger and more numerous than they were Tuesday night. “When a guy has nobody on him for 30, 40 feet, that’s usually not good news in this league.”
The Thrashers have been shut out in eight of the nine periods since the All-Star break, and they had very few scoring chances in those periods. It’s one thing when you get shut out by a hot goalie; it’s another when you hardly make that goalie break a sweat.
To all the 151 Thrashers fans who made the trip to support your team, know this: The players noticed, even if they didn’t play like they noticed.
“The way they supported us, it’s unbelievable,” Kovalchuk said. “I’ve never seen, on the road, that many fans supporting us. I didn’t expect it. We have to show a better effort, especially when we’ve got so many people supporting us.”
“I felt a lot of energy from the team [in warmups] because of all the fan support,” Little said. “They were so loud throughout the game. It’s pretty disappointing we couldn’t give them a good game.”
“It’s awesome [support],” Hainsey said. “You could hear them throughout the game chanting, and all through warmups they were raucous getting us into it. It was great. We just couldn’t use it, obviously, in the first 20 minutes.”
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New lineup, new results?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Kovalchuk-Peverley-Little
Kozlov-White-Thorburn
Motzko-Reasoner-Armstrong
Boulton-Perrin-Stuart
Havelid-Enstrom
Schneider-Bogosian
Hainsey-Oystrick
Lehtonen
Erik Christensen and Boris Valabik are healthy scratches. Colin Stuart will wear No. 49 and Joe Motzko No. 41. Stuart will be on the penalty kill, and Motzko will get a shot at some power play minutes. I’m not positive about the defensive pairings.
The first two lines are ones Thrashers coach John Anderson used in the third period of the 5-4 loss to the Islanders Tuesday night. The Thrashers scored four goals in that period.
Anderson, on the new Kozlov-White-Thorburn line: “Hopefully we’ll keep them together for three or four games. That’ll mean we’re winning.”
The Thrashers are looking to snap a three-game losing streak.
