FRONTS: PETER PRINCIPLE, NOT PETER PUCK

It's the ol' youth condemns, maturity condones regarding the Limestone City's Light Brigade.

The Ontario Hockey League does like to give lip-service to how it imparts lessons for life in addition to being a competitive enterprise where teams are ultimately judged on the W's and L's. The 19 young men who laced up for the Kingston Frontenacs this weekend ideally would have gleaned something from today, in between the long haul on the bus through a snowstorm to Kitchener, where they arrived late to take their medicine in the form of a 5-0 rout by the Rangers. Talk about dealing with adversity.

The Fronts have lost five straight and haven't had a single player acknowledged in the three-star selections in any of one those games, not even in Saturday's last-minute loss in Erie. (Erie doesn't win much, but geez, doesn't common courtesy demand that the losing team gets one star in a 4-3 game that was tied going into the final minute?)

Having gone five games without a star affirms how much having some top-end offensive talent last season such as Bobby Bolt, Cory Emmerton, Bobby Hughes, Peder Skinner and Chris Stewart really did provide a Cadillac façade on a Chevette organization. Without the star quality talent, what is there really?

The remaining Fronts have a chance to pick up some knowledge that will serve them will in the working world, thanks to life with GM-for-life Larry Mavety and owner Doug Springer. They're getting a MBA in something the rest of us don't get into well into our 20s, how to show up to work every day even when you really, really can't find a point in what you're doing, and have come to understand that the Peter Principle of promoting people until you find their maximum level of incompetence rules the organization. In other words, the Fronts are basically like Office Space, on skates.

Or how about Clerks? You can picture goalie Jason Guy being Dante Hicks -- "I'm not even supposed to be here today!" -- after being pelted with pucks, 52 shots, including 29 in the first period. The Rangers are missing three of their top four scorers to illness or the World Juniors, by the way. Meantime, the Fronts were on the power play for the first 3:42 of the second and didn't get a single shot.

The Fronts were 0-for-10 on the power play, too), but really, Mavety and Springer defeat the purpose of throwing out statistics. That's about all the Fronts have defeated lately.