Thrashers still adjusting to new coach’s system

New Georgia Tech football coach Paul Johnson had more than 40 practices to install his offense before turning it loose in a regular-season game.

New Thrashers coach John Anderson has had only 14 days of practice and exhibitions and will have just three more before his team opens the season on Friday against Washington.

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AP

The Thrasher will open the season at home Friday against the Capitals. Starting goalie Kari Lehtonen has a .916 saves percentage against Washington.

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No wonder it looks as if Anderson is off to a slower start.

No, the Thrashers aren’t running the option, but they can’t send Ilya Kovalchuk up the middle on down after down, or breakout after breakout, either. Players have to make reads and adjustments to put themselves in the right place and make the right pass. Blow it and the result could be a 2-on-1 headed straight at goalie Kari Lehtonen.

“We’re running at about 30 percent of what I want to see,” Anderson said after the final exhibition game, Saturday’s 4-1 loss to St. Louis. “It’s not so much doing the systems, but it’s consistently doing them right.”

Like Johnson, whose system won at Georgia Southern and Navy, Anderson has faith in what he does, which won for the minor league Chicago Wolves. He said it generally took a couple of months before his Wolves teams got up to full speed but that he hopes the Thrashers, with older and better players, can adapt more quickly.

“It’s not a hard system, but it’s completely different than the system they ran in the past,” said forward Brett Sterling, who played 13 games with the Thrashers last season. “You’re comparing apples and oranges. It’s tough when you’ve been doing this for [more than four seasons under former coach Bob Hartley], and you’re doing that same system over and over and over, and it gets ingrained in you, and you’ve got to completely switch.

“What guys are doing is they’re playing off instinct, which is the best thing to do, but when your instinct is telling you to do something different than what the system is doing, that’s where guys start making mistakes, get screwed up, and collapses happen.”

That led to the NHL’s worst exhibition record of 2008. The Thrashers went 1-5, scored one goal or no goals in half of their games, and allowed a league-worst 4.8 goals per game. They also were one of the league’s most penalized teams, at more than 24 minutes per game.

“When we do have those lapses, guys are trying to hold the guy, hook the guy,” Sterling said. “That’s when you get into a lot of problems.”

Not every Thrashers player faces the same challenge in learning what Anderson wants. A quarter of the skaters currently on the roster played for Anderson in Chicago a significant part of last season. That has been a big help for Sterling, Bryan Little, Colin Stuart, Joey Crabb and defensemen Nathan Oystrick and Boris Valabik.

“It’s huge for us, because normally the rookies are the guys coming in, they don’t know the systems,” Sterling said. “When … you’re trying to prove yourself, you want to be active and not thinking out there. It’s a little tougher for the veteran guys because they haven’t done this system before. They’re a little behind the eight ball to start.”

He sees hope in what has happened in those rare gaps between the breakdowns, when Anderson’s system comes to life on the ice.

“When we’re doing it correctly, we’ve taken it to teams,” Sterling said. “We’ve just got to continue to work on that.”