Add Your Comment |

Blame Game Not Part of This Storm

By Chuck Gormley
November 2, 2009

Paul Maurice, if you’re reading this, please don’t take it personally, but …

By this time last season, the struggling Chicago Blackhawks had already fired coach Denis Savard, and the Tampa Bay Lightning had pretty much seen enough of Barry Melrose, eventually pulling the plug on him in mid-November.

Coaching in the NHL is a little like being a stockbroker on Wall Street. One week you’re at the top of your profession, the next you’re filling out online job applications. Which brings us to Paul Maurice, twice hired and once fired by the Carolina Hurricanes.

Fresh off a trip to the 2009 Eastern Conference Finals, the Canes got off to a 2-8-3 start and are coming off a weekend washout in which they got clubbed by the Flyers and Sharks by a combined score of 11-2. For those counting that’s nine straight losses for the Canes.

Normally, that means a ticket out of town for an NHL coach. But instead of putting Maurice, who was hired 11 months ago to replace Peter Laviolette, on notice, Carolina general manager Jim Rutherford pointed an accusatory finger at – himself.

Rutherford told reporters on Monday that he made gross miscalculations with players he chose to sign or re-sign over the summer and will spend the next several weeks trying to fix his mistakes.

“I probably should have gone about this a different way, and I take full responsibility for what’s going on,” Rutherford told reporters on Monday. “Now I have to fix it.”

Over the summer Rutherford elected to re-sign veterans Erik Cole, Chad LaRose, Tuomo Ruutu and Jussi Jokinen, while adding veteran free agents Tom Kostopoulos, Aaron Ward, Stephane Yelle and Andrew Alberts.

The results have been catastrophic.

Through their first 13 games, the Canes had been outscored 50-28 and their seven points were just one from the Eastern Conference basement, which was being occupied by the Toronto Maple Leafs. The Canes also learned this week they’ll be without star center Eric Staal with an upper body injury. Staal had just five points and was a minus-5 in his first 13 games.

“You try to re-sign everybody … and they get in a totally different position in their careers than they’ve ever been,” Rutherford said. “Maybe we should have had a little bigger change. Maybe we shouldn’t have gone with as many veteran players as we did. I don’t have the answers for it, nobody does, and everybody can guess. Obviously, whatever I did didn’t work.”

After 13 games, aside from right wing Scott Walker, who was a team-best plus-3, every member of the Hurricanes was even or minus in the plus-minus rankings. The once-reliable Rod Brind’Amour carried a team-worst minus-9 into this week and the 30-year-old center is coming off a season in which he posted a career-worst minus-23.

So how does Rutherford plan on fixing his broken team? Most NHL general managers choose to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic, hoping a coaching change will create urgency in his team’s players.
Not Rutherford. He said he will try to fix his mistakes by trading them away and replacing them with talented prospects – either from his organization or someone else’s.

“If we can move certain players, then we can start to transition into the team that we felt we would transition into next year,” Rutherford said. “We do have a lot of good young players now, and I’m not sure that they’re 100 percent ready to play here, but if we’re not going to win with a veteran team, then we may as well transition sooner rather than later.”

Rutherford will be actively calling around the NHL looking for young prospects in exchange for some of his underperforming veterans, but it won’t be easy with many of the NHL’s top teams close to the salary ceiling.

That could mean immediate quality ice time for 20-year-old forward prospects Brandon Sutter, Zach Boychuk and Drayson Bowman. Sutter and Boychuk were first-round picks of the Canes in 2007 and 2008, respectively, while Bowman was a third-rounder in 2007.

Rutherford said he would like to see the Hurricanes turn their season around quickly, but questions whether there is a magic wand for a team this far along into the season.

“We owe it to our fans every year to be a playoff team, and if I feel that we’re just getting into too deep of a hole then I’ll accelerate (the rebuilding),” Rutherford said. “If I still think that this team can turn it around, then we’ll keep going in the direction that we’re going.”

And if not?

“I’ve seen enough to where I’m as disappointed as I’ve ever been in a team,” he said. “I still know that there’s enough here to make that turn, but when you watch what we’ve all watched here in the last week, it makes you wonder if it’s going to turn.”

HAPPY TO BE RUFF
Things are just rosy in Buffalo these days now that the Sabres are off to an 8-2-1 start and goaltender Ryan Miller is 8-1-1 with a 1.86 GAA. Even coach Lindy Ruff, the most durable coach in the NHL, cracked a one-liner when asked why his team’s second-leading scorer, Jason Pominville, did not skate on Monday. “The population of Pominville went up, so he had the day off,” Ruff said, referring to a new baby for Pominville and his wife.

PETER THE GREAT
In case you missed it, Swedish center Peter Forsberg is back on the comeback trail, apparently trying to keep up with Brett Favre. Forsberg will play for Sweden’s national team for the Karjala Cup. He’s been mum on whether it will be a springboard to the NHL or simply a tuneup for the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver.

Chuck Gormley covers the Philadelphia Flyers for the Camden (NJ) Courier-Post and recently published Orange, Black & Blue: The Greatest Philadelphia Flyers Stories Never Told now available in bookstores.