Upcoming stretch could determine Thrashers' playoff fate

By Chris Vivlamore

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

For the Thrashers, there is no place like ... the road.

They begin a four-game road trip Friday in Florida and play 13 of their next 17 games away from Philips Arena. That might just be a good thing.

The Thrashers are 8-2-1 on the road and 6-6-2 at home this season. The statistics point to better play on the road. For example, the Thrashers have a better goals-per-game average, goals-against average, power-play percentage and penalty-kill percentage on the road. They also appear to be more aggressive, with more hits (227-118).

“If we are going to make the playoffs, we need to win on the road, too,” Slava Kozlov said Friday. “We do need to play better at home.”

Coach John Anderson points to the early-season home schedule. Three of the Thrashers’ first four games were against Washington (twice) and San Jose.

“It’s just that little fear in us about not wanting to get blown out [on the road],” Anderson said. “It’s just that little extra focus that pushes us over the top. The follow-up question would be ‘Why don’t we have that at home?’ I think we do, but those first three games for us were so difficult -- Washington and San Jose, teams that had well over 100 points last year.

"We competed really hard in those games. A little bounce here and a bounce there, and we could have won those games. That’s the way it happens. We’re fighting a three-game deficit right off the bat. We’re climbing back in slowly.”

The Thrashers have played better at home of late. They went 8-2-2 in the past 12 games, nine of them at home, including Thursday’s 4-1 loss to the New York Islanders.

“We weren’t horrible, and we weren’t great,” Anderson said of the loss that snapped a four-game win streak. “It was just doing the little extra things that we could have done. The game could have gone either way, but we don’t want to have games like that. We want to have games that we should have won. Even if we lost the game we want to say ‘Geez, we should have won.’ Especially against a team we’re fighting for a playoff spot. … The extraordinary is the little extra that makes it more than ordinary.”

Thrashers coaches divide the season into segments for evaluation purposes. A new segment begins with this road trip.

The upcoming stretch of 17 games, which includes a three-game homestand, concludes Jan. 5 at Pittsburgh. How the Thrashers fare in that stretch will go a long way to determine where it is in the playoff race.

“If we can come out of this trip over .500 -- on the trip -- we’ll set ourselves up,” Ron Hainsey said. “We have a lot of home games January and March. At the end of the year it’s going to be important to have all those home games.”

The Thrashers, with 31 points, are fifth in the Eastern Conference. They have played the fewest games in the NHL. They will play 7 of 11 games at home in January after returning from Pittsburgh. Following the two-week break in February for the Olympics, the Thrashers play 12 of 17 games at home in March.

“We’ve had some games on the road we should have lost, and we’ve had some games at home we should have won,” Hainsey said. “That stuff evens out over the course of a season. We want home games near the end of the season.”

On the road, the Thrashers are on a defined schedule, spending more time together as a team. They also will see bigger crowds on the Canadian leg of the trip -- in Toronto, Calgary and Vancouver -- than they have seen recently at Philips Arena.

“In Canada there are going to be big crowds. It’s always nice to play there. ... I like to stay home, but we play good on the road. At home you are with the family, on the road you hang out with the boys. It’s nice, too.”