Thrashers' new coach will have reason to be optimistic

Regardless of who becomes the next permanent coach of the Atlanta Thrashers, he'll be optimistic about the NHL's worst team and promise brighter days ahead. As he should.

The clichéd response might be a given, since enthusiasm is at least as much of a requisite for new coaches these days as the ability and experience they bring with them. But in the Thrashers' case, whoever lands behind their bench won't be simply putting his best face forward.

Not that the successor to Curt Fraser, who was fired Thursday, will be stepping into the lottery-like situation Tony Granato did last week in Colorado. But Atlanta's new coach will get a team that has some legitimate talent and is poised to be a lot better than it has been through 3½ years of NHL play.

Byron Dafoe hasn't lived up to the Thrashers' lofty expectations, likely costing coach Curt Fraser his job.(AP)

Which is why Fraser gets to go home for the holidays, leaving general manager Don Waddell to run the bench on a temporary basis while he searches for a full-time replacement. It's a move that was inevitable, if not for more than a year, then at least since late November, when Atlanta signed free-agent goalie Byron Dafoe .

Acquiring Dafoe was supposed to give Atlanta the level of quality goaltending it was obviously lacking since its debut in 1999-2000 and help it make some noise in the suddenly wide-open Southeast Division. Instead, it took away Fraser's last method of deflecting blame for the Thrashers woes from himself.

Certainly Dafoe's failure to look like anything resembling an elite netminder in an Atlanta uniform -- he's 2-7 with an .867 save percentage and a 3.95 goals-against average -- didn't help Fraser. Nor did the team's sorry collection of defensemen. But as far as Fraser's tenure was concerned, they didn't cause his downfall as much as doing nothing to prevent it.

The reality for Fraser was that the honeymoon coaches of expansion teams enjoy, especially in a non-traditional market, had long worn off. In Year 4 of a new operation, the novelty factor is gone, and management can no longer afford to be patient, especially when there are far more empty seats than occupied ones in the arena.

It's a time when signs of improvement are justifiably expected, but in Atlanta's case, the team was regressing, sporting the league's worst record despite putting its best-ever lineup, albeit one that still had several holes, on the ice.

There are a lot of times when a fired coach is victimized by the failures of his players, but not in this case. Fraser himself might have inadvertently admitted as much after Atlanta blew a two-goal lead to Carolina last Friday and lost in overtime.

"This keeps happening over and over," he said. "For nearly 55 minutes, we looked like champs. Then we look like we've never played the game."

Pointing the finger at the coach for that is not unreasonable.

Fraser, a serviceable player during a 12-year career with Vancouver, Chicago and the Minnesota North Stars, was a successful minor-league coach who brought his lunch-bucket mentality with him to his first NHL coaching job in Atlanta. For the most part, he got his players to work hard, but for all his good intentions, he failed to point them in the right direction.

For the first two years, Atlanta's lack of talent offered him convenient cover, but when the Thrashers took a step backward last season, despite incredible rookie campaigns from budding superstars Dany Heatley and Ilya Kovalchuk, Fraser began to feel the ice melting beneath him.

Still, Waddell gave him another chance this season with a one-year extension. The GM also spent the summer trying to build around Heatley and Kovalchuk, acquiring talented veteran forwards Shawn McEachern and Slava Kozlov to add some offensive depth and veteran defensemen Richard Smehlik and Uwe Krupp.

But for all those moves, the Thrashers managed only one tie in 10 games during October. To be fair, Smehlik and Krupp were sidelined for the most part with injuries, and even Waddell acknowledged that the goaltending was hurting the team, which is probably why Fraser was still Atlanta's coach in November.

And things did get better for the Thrashers in the second month as 22-year-old Patrik Stefan, the team's first-ever draft choice, began living up to his promise alongside Heatley and Kovalchuk. Waddell even made two more moves, picking up a talented young center named Marc Savard from Calgary and then signing Dafoe.

That helped Atlanta go 6-6 during the second month, but once the calendar page turned to December, the team started heading south for the winter. It was not only that the Thrashers lost nine of the 11 games they've played this month; it was the ugly way they have been losing that finally spelled the end for Fraser.

Even the players realized it.

"I'm sure there's a mental part to figure out why we do this, but it's easier said than done," Dafoe said after one of those losses. "Right now, I think guys just need to learn how to win."

With a new coach, they might just do that.