No excuses as Pleau leaves Edmonton

By GREGG DRINNAN
Daily News Sports Editor
This isn’t expected to be a highly active offseason on the WHL coaching front, unless professional teams reach down for help.
But there will be at least one coaching change before another season gets here.
That’s because the Edmonton Oil Kings, who are owned by the NHL’s Edmonton Oilers, announced Tuesday that neither head coach Steve Pleau nor assistant coach Rocky Thompson will be returning for a fourth season. The Oil Kings also let go trainer Terrill Lobo, while keeping assistant coach Darryl Weinberger, who is their video guy.
Pleau and Thompson had been on the coaching staff since the Oil Kings entered the WHL as an expansion team for the 2007-08 season. The Oil Kings were 67-116-12-21 under Pleau, including 16-43-4-9 this season.
Pleau, the son of Larry Pleau, the senior vice-president and general manager of the NHL’s St. Louis Blues, had one year left on his contract. He had been given an extension through 2010-11 on June 9 and the deal had an option built into it that would have given him yet another year had the Oil Kings made the playoffs this season or next.
Pleau, 37, got the news Tuesday via a phone call from general manager Bob Green, who is in Europe. Apparently, Green, his travel plans impacted by ash from that Icelandic volcano, was riding a train to Rome on Tuesday as he tries to get home from the IIHF U-18 world championship in Belarus.
“To be fair to him, he didn’t want to have to do it (that way),” Pleau said. “But it was one of those things that had to be done.”
Pleau said that his firing didn’t come as a surprise.
“You get 16 wins, you’re going to be held accountable and I think that’s fair,” he said. “I think that’s the way it should be.”
Looking back, Pleau said the toboggan ride may well have started in Kamloops on Nov. 6 when the Oil Kings blew a 4-1 lead and lost 6-5 in overtime. That was Edmonton’s fourth straight loss and before long it had just one victory in 18 games.
At the same time, the roster was being ravaged by a flu bug. At one point, the Oil Kings, in an attempt to keep the ill players separated from the healthy ones, had the ill ride in a van that followed the bus.
Pleau, though, wasn’t using that as an excuse.
“You have to find a way to control those better than we did as a coaching staff,” he said. “You can’t allow that to put you into the tailspin that we had. That’s my job as a head coach.”
Pleau, who is married with two children ages three and six, said his short-term plans include moving his family back to the Boston area, which is their home.
“I think we’ll take a step back here,” he said. “We’re pretty far from home and that comes into the equation quite a bit. We’ve moved around quite a bit so we might just head home for a while, take a step back and see what we want to do.”
One thing is for certain, though — Pleau considers himself a coach.
“Absolutely,” he said.
Green told the Edmonton Sun that firing Pleau “was a really tough decision.”
“(Pleau is) a good guy, he works really hard at it,” Green said. “Things just didn’t go our way this year for a lot of different reasons. With 16 wins, you have to evaluate these things and, unfortunately, at the end of the day we felt it was a move that we had to make.
“I thought the kids played hard for him, the message just wasn’t getting through a lot of the time. Why that was, it really doesn’t matter now, it just wasn’t. That what made things difficult.”
JUST NOTES: D Max Mowat, who saw a bit of time with the Kamloops Blazers this season, has been named to the B.C. major midget league all-star team. Mowat, who played for the Okanagan Rockets, led defencemen with 36 points in 40 games. . . . Dr. Todd Ring of Kamloops, who works with the Blazers, is in Belarus with the Canadian team that is playing in the relegation round at the IIHF U-18 world championship. Canada, which didn’t qualify for the medal round for the first time since the tournament began in 2002, is to play Latvia today and Belarus on Thursday.

gdrinnan@kamloopsnews.ca
gdrinnan.blogspot.com