Hartley's exodus just the tip of Atlanta's off-ice woes
I'm guessing that when you hear from Atlanta Thrashers players about their fired coach Bob Hartley, the comments will sound pretty typical.
You know the drill. Whenever something like this happens, the athletes talk about how it wasn't one guy's fault, how the coach isn't the one out there on the ice and how they wish they had done a better job for the guy. And they sound as sincere as Sen. Larry Craig does whenever he expresses disbelief at the reaction to his wide stance.
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| Bob Hartley's Thrashers were outscored 27-9 through six games this season. (Getty Images) |
From a technical perspective, Hartley is a good NHL coach, one who has a Stanley Cup on his resume and has spent several years honing his considerable skills as a teacher. He's animated, aggressive and driven behind the bench, but he's also a hard-ass who rides players to the extreme and tends to wear out his welcome in a relatively short time. That's what happened in Colorado, where he was dumped 18 months after leading the Avs to a Stanley Cup, and again this time in Atlanta after his team crashed and burned so badly in the playoffs last spring and failed to bounce back up at the start of this season.
The coach has to be the fall guy in a situation like that, especially considering how essential a good start is to NHL teams these days. In Atlanta's case, though, general manager Don Waddell should be accompanying him out the door because of the team's 0-6 record. This is an extremely critical season for the franchise that needs to show progress and take advantage of the attention it will get locally from being host of the All-Star Game and being the antithesis to Michael Vick and the disappointing Hawks and Braves.
Waddell even admitted that.
"We're still building this hockey market and what we gained last year, we don't want to lose in the first season of the month, that's for sure," Waddell said. "We owe it to our fans to do what we can to win hockey games."
Sure they do, except the Thrashers are being set up for more of the same as Waddell takes over behind the bench while he searches for a permanent replacement. Call it another example of the cover-your-ass approach perfected by a former colleague in Columbus named Doug MacLean who, like Waddell, ran his franchise from the time it joined the NHL. MacLean got the Jackets nowhere before he was fired last season but managed to save his own scalp by dumping coaches repeatedly along the way. Waddell wasn't as quick to pull the trigger -- Hartley was only the second full-time coach Atlanta has had since starting play in 1999 -- but firing the coach says as much about his own failures as it does about Hartley's.
Atlanta missed the playoffs in each of its first six seasons, including 2005-06, when Waddell made an ill-advised midseason guarantee that the team would get to the spring dance. They came close, but not enough to get anyone excited in a market where hockey has yet to take root. So last season the GM went out even further on a limb and mortgaged futures at the trade deadline to acquire veteran Alexei Zhitnik and rental Keith Tkachuk.
Those moves actually paid off because Atlanta won the Southeast Division, although it finished only two points ahead of Tampa Bay, who ended up with the seventh seed in the Eastern Conference as a result. But whatever inroads the Thrashers might have made in their marketplace were dashed immediately because they were embarrassingly swept in the first round by the New York Rangers.
Atlanta looked completely unprepared, and worse, Hartley did a number on the team's star young goalie, Kari Lehtonen, by pulling him twice in the series and letting backup Johan Hedberg start the fourth and final game. It's the kind of thing that doesn't do much for a kid's confidence, and it has been apparent in the way Lehtonen has played this season.
But he's not the only one who has faltered. The Thrashers offense has been nonexistent, the defense even worse, and for the most part, the team has looked like it's just going through the motions. Although the general manager didn't give him a great deal to work with, Hartley's personality didn't help. There are obvious holes along the blue line and particularly on the first line, where Waddell failed to get the team the center it needed. And the absence of leading scorer Marian Hossa because of a groin injury hasn't helped.
Then again that's something the Thrashers should get used to, because Hossa will become a free agent after the season. Waddell says he wants to re-sign the superstar, but the scuttlebutt for months has been that Hossa is just running out the clock and can't wait to get out of town because he doesn't think the organization is headed in the right direction.
Who can argue with that?
