Sunday, February 19, 2006

Wanted: Coach for Team Canada

I'm pretty steamed about this subject, so I'm going to keep it short, irrational, and based on as little actual knowledge of the situation as possible...

If you're anything like me, you've got a healthy self-esteem (read as "ego"), an infrequently updated blog, and piercing headaches when you go more than 24 hours without a coffee. You also would have been up early this Saturday morning to have the pleasure of watching the highly-touted Team Canada get shutout by Switzerland, hockey powerhouse that they are, in Olympic Men's Ice Hockey. Moreover, you would have shaken that dismal performance off as a "bad day", an "anomoly", a "momentary lapse", as it were... And then you would have watched with a sickening sense of deja vu (which, I believe, is French for "I don't speak French") as they got shutout by Team Finland today.

Enough is enough already.

I don't blame the guys for this... I don't blame the jetlag, either... I don't even blame the gruelling NHL schedule leading up to the Olympic break. I blame Pat Quinn. And I blame whoever it was that named Pat Quinn coach of Team Canada, even if that someone is The Great One himself (I'm referring to Wayne Gretzky this time, not me).

There are 6 Canadian teams in the NHL, all but 2 of them who have been having great seasons of late. Among those 2 is the Toronto Maple Leafs, coached by Quinn. This guy can't get the Leafs out of the basement of the League, and yet we expect him to take a bunch of guys who don't normally play together and lead them to Gold at the Olympics? Ridiculous!

I just hope that we see a real coach like Darryl Sutter or Marc Crawford behind the bench when Vancouver 2010 rolls around...

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