Blazers new contracts

From The Daily News of Thursday, July 19

The Kamloops Blazers have agreed to terms with their three coaches and their
director of marketing, apparently swallowing a poison pill in the process.
Murray Owen, the president of the Kamloops Blazers Sports Society, announced
the deals Tuesday at a news conference in the WHL team’s boardroom at the
Interior Savings Centre.
Dean Clark, the general manager and head coach, Shane Zulyniak, the
assistant GM and assistant coach, assistant coach Andrew Milne and director
of marketing Dave Chyzowski have new contracts that could run through
2009-10.
The three coaches had been signed through 2007-08; Chyzowski, who joined the
club’s front office in December, didn’t have a contract.
A press release issued by the team states that the contracts “run until the
end of the 2009-10 WHL season.
The Daily News has learned that each of the contracts calls for two years
with the club holding an option on a third season. However, a clause in each
contract calls for the third year to be guaranteed should the franchise be
sold.
With the society’s board of directors negotiating the contracts while
knowing an offer to purchase was being prepared by River City Hockey Inc.,
Owen was asked if the board had adopted a poison pill approach.
“The wording of the contracts is under review,” he said. “I can’t really
comment on that at the moment.”
Vancouver businessman Tom Gaglardi, who heads up RCH, said last night that
“it’s a poison pill. There’s no other way to look at it.”
Clark, who left for Alberta yesterday in hopes of signing centre Brendan
Ranford, the team’s first-round pick, 15th overall, in the WHL’s 2007 bantam
draft, said “it was good” to have the contracts done. He said he was
especially pleased that the other three men now have some security.
“I think that was something that was important for me to get done,” Clark
said. “All three are fairly new at what they are doing and I didn’t want to
leave them hanging.
“Besides, with what happened last season I thought they deserved something.”
Clark, Zulyniak and Milne worked together for the first time last season.
They guided the Blazers to second place in the B.C. Division, their 40
victories and 86 points improvements of six and 13 respectively over the
previous season when the team didn’t make the playoffs for the first time in
franchise history. Last season, despite the 40 victories, the Blazers were
swept from the first round of playoffs by the Prince George Cougars.
Still, Owen, who travelled extensively with the team in what was his first
season as president, saw more than enough to convince him that new deals
were warranted.
“I’ve seen how they work,” he said. “I’ve seen the dedication and effort
they put into our hockey team. I’m absolutely 100 per cent behind the type
of coaching that we have. I can’t say enough about the (coaching) team that
we have here.
“We want stability. This is how we plan on doing it.”