Changes, ch-ch-ch-changes

From The Daily News of Monday, Jan. 7, 2008 . . .

Tom Gaglardi is going to have to be careful or employees of the Kamloops
Blazers are going to start thinking he is a bad news bearer.
These days, it’s like every time he comes to town someone disappears from
the local WHL franchise.
Gaglardi, a Lower Mainland-based businessman who has been running the
franchise since its sale became official Oct. 25, paid the team a visit
early in November and general manager and head coach Dean Clark disappeared.
Gaglardi returned Dec. 11 and — poof! — assistant coach Andrew Milne was
gone.
So when Gaglardi arrived in town in the middle of last week, well, the hills
were alive with the sound of people walking on eggshells. With good reason,
as it turned out.
See you later, Larry Robinson. You used to be the goaltending coach. (Former
Blazers goaltender Steve Passmore, who first chatted with the team in early
November, now is the goaltending guru.)
Great victory beating the Tri-City Americans, fellas. Would everyone making
the trip to Kelowna and Vancouver please stand up. Uhh, three of you guys
who have names beginning with ‘B’ . . . Bartley, Bender and Brock . . . not
so fast.
With one foul Friday night swoop, Gaglardi rid the Blazers of their three
most-experienced players, defencemen Ryan Bender and Victor Bartley and
centre Brock Nixon, each of them having played in no other organization,
each with the Blazers logo tattooed on his butt and each a Clark loyalist.
Gaglardi left Kamloops on Saturday and was to fly to Mexico on Sunday. There
will be calm in Blazerville for a while, the Reign of Terror on hold until
the man whose fingerprints already are all over this organization puts in
another appearance.
The moves he has made are as much or more about an obsession with
eradicating Clark’s connections with this organization as they are about
attempting to improve a hockey team that has begun to resemble a flailing
man up to his armpits in quicksand. Even the players recognize that.
“I was kind of getting that feeling,” Nixon said Saturday afternoon as he
rode the Calgary bus to Red Deer where he would scoring the game-winning
goal that night. “And that’s how I felt, too. I was a product of what Dean
was preaching for four years. There was obviously some disagreement there
and I was kind of caught in the middle. Obviously, what I am trying to
preach probably isn’t the same message.”
What is really sad is that the winds of change have carried away three
classy young men, people you should want to bring into your dressing room
and into your community and keep there. Successful organizations simply
can't afford to let these kinds of people go. But it has become so
frustrating to play here, with the snowball now so large that it seemingly
can’t be stopped, that two of them had done the unthinkable and asked to be
traded. And yet both expressed sadness at leaving their adopted hometown.
Nixon went so far as to thank the new owners:
“As much shaking up as the ownership group has done with different things —
they’ll probably be taking some heat for this, not necessarily for selling
the whole farm but for removing three guys like us — I can’t express enough
gratitude and thanks to them for giving me this opportunity. It would have
been easy for them to say, ‘No, we’re not going to move you.’ They showed a
lot of class in doing that and I am very thankful for that.”
It likely won’t be long now before Blazers fans get yet another spiel about
the culture being terrible and how it needs to be reworked — again — and
that it is going to take some time to turn this ship around overnight and
that fans are going to have to be patient. That may be true, but Blazers
supporters have to be tired of that song-and-dance routine by now.
Let’s not forget, too, that this is a team that has been blown up despite
having won 40 games last season. You may recall that the Blazers lost only
seven times in 36 home dates last season. And yet new ownership, at the
first sign of adversity, decided it was time to start over. So they bombed
it, set it on fire and bombed it again.
No one will say it publicly but this season, one in which the Blazers were
supposed to contend with the Vancouvers, the Spokanes and the Tri-Citys, has
been scuttled. They will be in the playoffs, thanks to the ineptitude of the
Prince George Cougars and Portland Winter Hawks, and they will be
eliminated, again, in the first round.
Summer will bring with it even more change — a general manager, another head
coach, one or two assistant coaches. More people will come and some will go.
And summer will morph into another season of rebuilding.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way.
When this season began, Bender, Bartley, Ryan White and Keaton Ellerby were
going to provide the Blazers with the best defence and key the premier
transition game in the WHL. They are gone. There is one defenceman —
sophomore Jordan Rowley — left from last season.
There are just as many question marks up front, where fans are left to
wonder from where the goals are going to come. Right-winger Juuso Puustinen,
who is due to return Thursday from the World Junior Championship, is the
best offensive player remaining, but how happy will he be with Nixon, his
partner in scoring, no longer here? Left-winger Ivan Rohac was an unhappy
camper when he left to play for Slovakia at the World Junior Championship.
He is due back Thursday, but in what frame of mind will he return?
And now the stories coming out of the team’s office and dressing room would
do a Stephen King novel proud.
There are those employees who wonder if their phones are tapped. They wonder
if someone has been reading their e-mail. Earlier, because The Daily News
reported the hiring of interim head coach Greg Hawgood and the trading of
defenceman Keaton Ellerby before the team had made the announcements,
management demanded that employees sign confidentiality agreements. Some
employees, past and present, have been ordered not to talk to me.
Someone, it seems, has found the enemy and it is us.

Gregg Drinnan is sports editor of The Daily News. He is at
gdrinnan@kamloopsnews.ca