AJC > Sports Thrashers > Blog > Archives > 2007 > April > 13
Friday, April 13, 2007
Ye olde switcheroo
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Seems like everybody’s thrown their two cents in on this issue already today, enough money to buy myself a gray guitar and play ….
I just engaged three co-workers in a Kari-vs-Moose debate, trying to iron out exactly what I might say in written form. Because this is, after all, a complex argument.
So it went something like this:
Me: Say, what do you dudes make of the goalie switch?
Co-worker 1: Well, doesn’t it basically ….
Me: Whatever, dude! Next!
Co-worker 2: Who’s got the better goals-against average?
Me: What’s that got to do with it, you f-in idiot?
Co-worker 3: Are you really interested in our opinions?
Me: I guess not. Thanks for your help.
So, it wasn’t quite as productive as it could have been. But here’s the best way I can sum up my opinion of this move:
I like it. I think we all wanted Kari to be the next Patrick Roy so badly that we overlooked flaws in his game because of the moments of greatness he displays. He is a very, very, very good young goalie. He can be a franchise goalie someday. But he is not yet. If he had played as good this season as we all wanted him to, this lingering sense of a goalie controversy would have died months ago.
Instead, Kari had so many letdowns over the course of the season that he almost became unreliable. He never took this team by the scruff of the neck and made it his. His grooming as the franchise goalie should have been completed by, say, February. Instead, it got to be April and we were still saying, “We think Kari can rise to the occasion.”
The time for Wishing and Hoping and Thinking is done. And Bob Hartley knows it. He made the kind of decision a serious NHL coach makes. It wasn’t on a whim. It wasn’t a knee-jerk reaction to the bad goal in Game 1. It was the culmination of a season-long wait for Lehtonen to emerge as an uncontested No. 1. If anything, Kari’s Game 1 performance helped Hartley shake off his blinders, helped him snap out of the “Kari’s the franchise goalie” trance … to where he could finally say, “If we’re going to beat the Rangers in four of six games, who’s the goalie I trust more?”
The answer for a coach who historically loves veterans was easy. I support it. I think the players support it. If you read between the lines of the player quotes, they all say things like, “Well, Moose is older and has been around” and “Kari will bounce back from this.” In player-speak, those translate to: Kid’s not ready. We’re gonna live and die with experience. And I’ll repeat what I said yesterday: Dying his hair blue did NOTHING to instill confidence in his teammates. If anything, it made them question where his mind was at, and it gave Hartley the ammunition to make this move.
A common question that came up today was: Don’t the Thrashers run the risk of alienating their young goalie and ruining his confidence?
To that I say: If getting benched is going to send the kid into a four- or five- or 15-year pouting funk, then so be it. Then that would be reason enough to make the move now instead of later. It would only prove that he’s not mentally ready.
I hope it doesn’t come to that, obviously.
OK, all that said, now the puck is in Hedberg’s rink. He can make Hartley look like a genius … or he can turn this into a total fiasco.
See you at 3.
