Some time between now and the May 3 OHL draft, the Frontenacs are expected to announce the hiring of former Toronto Maple Leaf Todd Gill as their new coach.Again, this is still hearsay and conjecture. There's no word if Gill would simply coach
Gill, 42, guided the Brockville Braves to the third-best regular-season record in the Central Junior Hockey League before they lost to the Smiths Falls Bears in the playoff semi-finals. -- Don Campbell, Ottawa Citizen
with Larry Mavety continuing as GM-for-life, which would be a real downer.
Cynics would suggest Gill is a good choice since a man who played with the Harold Ballard-era Toronto Maple Leafs has plenty of experience with a hockey team with, um, idiosyncratic ownership. Also, the Frontenacs floundered with a former NHL coach, Bruce Cassidy, they might as well try their luck with one coming up from Tier II Junior A. Their next coach will have to come over from university hockey.
Granted, Gill, whom Sun Media's Bob Elliott profiled over the winter, is serious about being a junior hockey coach. The ex-defenceman coaching the Frontenacs would keep up with the trend of ex-NHLers making the switch to running junior teams -- Bob Boughner in Windsor, Patrick Roy in Quebec, Greg Hawgood in Kamloops.
(Oh, and Todd Gill was a better player than 95% of Leafs Nation ever gave him credit for. Just watch Game 7 between the Leafs and Red Wings the next time it pops up on ESPN Classic Canada.)
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2 comments:
I doubt Mavety will get run. He appears to have the confidence of the owner for whatever reason, and he can always play the hope card, what with 16 players back next year.
If the owner is as clueless as you suggest, why would he fire the GM? That would put a lot of pressure on him to do a search for a successor, and that's a lot of work. It is also admitting failure, something that older, wealthy while males don't like in the least. Typically, sports team owners have been successful in their other business ventures, so this whole losing thing is a little foreign to them.
Springer's not that old; he's only his 30s.
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