John Anderson is out of a job this morning and Don Waddell, kicked upstairs, has a better office, albeit one further removed from the day-to-day disaster he directed the last decade as general manager. The Atlanta Thrashers are a mess. What a sad story.
Who was there from the beginning up to now? Mr. Waddell take a step forward. John Anderson, plucked from the Chicago Wolves of the American Hockey League and given a bag full of goldfish and Ilya Kovalchuk to work with, could not turn his tender charges into a school of piranha.
And now he is out as coach. Goodbye John. Sorry to see you go. Next time, ask for Waddell's job first. The bar is pretty low. Relieving Waddell of the wheel is Rick Dudley, who will have his work cut out for him. First off, this franchise may have been working toward a disaster in the long run, but Dany Heatley's poor decisions behind the wheel made the long run a short run in short order.
Heatley crashes car and his teammate dies. Heatley asks out. Heatley moved to Ottawa for Marian Hossa. Hossa wants out. Hossa moved to Pittsburgh for more goldfish and Colby Armstrong. Kovalchuk says he wants to stay/acts like he wants to leave. This plays out like a bad root canal until the Devils extract Kovalchuk with an offer of more goldfish.
Take the keys from Waddell already.
I feel for hockey fans in Atlanta. You have a disaster on ice and yet people in Canada expect you and your family to get on that insanely clogged highway system/parking lot and battle your way to the arena to see mediocre hockey. Sure, the fans in Toronto do it, but what else is there to do in Toronto. They either don't know any better or they are just plain doorknob dumb in Toronto.
I'll be generous and say they don't know any better.
Maybe Dudley gets the Thrashers going in the right direction. Maybe the franchise and its fans grow old together in Atlanta. I hope so. But flipping through the sorry pages of NHL history, one can see the years littered with flim-flam owners, team executives with no clue, coaches with no clue, league executives with no clue.
So will the Thrashers ever become a success story in Atlanta. Like I said, I hope so. But at this point, I have no clue.
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