Sweet Tea, Barbecue, and Bodychecks

Those of you who know me know that I have high hopes for the Southeast every season. I want them to be a competitive division, rather than a clone of the Central. I’m not talking “competitive with each other”, I’m talking “competitive with the rest of the League”. I’d love to see all five SE teams in the playoffs–if for no other reason than that it would royally piss off the rest of the League, especially if one of those five teams wound up winning the Cup. It’s a big-picture thing for me. I want this division to be good and competitive for a long, long time so that they can get out of being perceived as a latter-day Norris division.

Carolina: Doing their best to stay competitive (and if only they’d played in the middle of the season the way they’ve played since February, then the fans wouldn’t be scarfing TUMS like it’s going out of style now). Extremely stable environment, which is good but also makes it tricky in terms of team chemistry–sometimes things are too stable for the team’s collective good, which leads to complacency (and debacles like the one that existed from November through January).

Washington: Doing their best to be competitive–though in fairness, they’ve been doing that with varying degrees of success for several years now. Now GMGM has somebody that he actually can build a team around, a cat who wants to stay in Washington and (more importantly) is willing to work to win, and in the long term that will reap dividends for the Caps. Stable environment, despite the occasional bit of coaching turmoil.

Florida: They’ve got the potential in place–at least, as long as ownership doesn’t keep hiring Mike freaking Keenan every three or four years or so to destabilize things and ruin whatever progress may have been achieved since the last time he ran roughshod over them. And as long as they stop whining about Carolina’s constantly mugging them for their lunch money.

Tampa: Give this team a coach who is not a petty tinpot dictator like Fidel Tortorella, and they will start to get back to where they once belonged–this situation is still in flux, but I think that once the ownership change happens (and Feaster and Tortorella are gone) things will settle down and head back upwards…as long as Doug MacLean isn’t allowed to sit in the GM’s office or get behind the bench.

And then we have the Atlanta Thrashers. Oh, they had a good season last year. But that’s it. The doormats of the Southeast, yet again. So they’re stable–but not in the good way.

The more I watch the Atlanta Thrashers, the more I wonder how in the Nine Worlds that pitiful milquetoast Don Waddell has a job…and then I read comments like these from Atlanta’s braintrust ownership:

“Mistakes have been made and really good decisions have also been made. I think that this franchise is moving in the right direction.”

“It’s easy to point a finger (at Waddell) and say this is the source of all the problems. It’s always more complicated than that. It would be foolish and short-sighted to tear it down.”

“I think we know how to sign free agents. Does every free agent work out? Gosh no.”

(comments courtesy the News and Observer)

“Mistakes have been made”–yeah, like drafting Patrik Stefan (though in Waddell’s weak defence, the Draft that year was pretty sux0r). “…really good decisions have also been made.”  Yeah, like…umm…err…uhh…yeah. Excuses, excuses, excuses. And things are only getting worse. Don Waddell, a man that I have absolutely zero confidence in, isn’t even bothering to ice a winning team. Friday night?  The man got bitched at by Mark Recchi, who interrupted a bench-side tirade from Waddell to say (and I rewound the DVR to make sure I read Rexy’s lips right): “What the fuck are you doing?!  Get somebody out on the ice!”  Not even Paul Maurice would take that from one of his players, no matter how well-deserved it is. 

The man has not just lost his mojo, he had none to begin with as he showed to the world with the roster he iced for the 2006 Olympic games in Turin (a roster about which I commented, back in 2005). With questionable drafting and a few even more questionable trades and signings (not to mention the man’s questionable attempts at coaching), the man’s doing the same thing to Atlanta that Doug MacLean tried to do to Columbus: running it into the ground.

Say what you will about Bob Hartley–yes, his Thrashers were cheap and dirty (and, as Friday night proved, they still are cheap and dirty), but at least the man got them to the playoffs. That Waddell allowed that team to so flagrantly turf their coach rather than sending a message by trading one of the ringleaders *coughHOLIKcough* shows just how he has lost this team and how he needs to be sent packing ASAP.

Of course, that will never happen as long as Atlanta Spirit keeps its collective head in the sand and continues to think that everything is fine in Blueland. My heart breaks for the Thrashers fans–they’re decent enough folks, they deserve far far better than what they’re getting.

Hurricanes take on the Capitals at the Phone Booth tomorrow night in a no-holds-barred deathmatch for the Southeast Division title. Puck drops at 7:00 PM.