Monday, October 07, 2013

Snider speaks out on Laviolette firing, more

Flyers chairman Ed Snider – off-podium media availability

On the coaching change

Paul Holmgren’s the general manager.  He hired the coach, and it’s his job to evaluate the coach, not mine.  I want to make that perfectly clear.  A lot of people think that I come in and say ‘you’ve got to fire the coach.’  No, I don’t.  I’ve never done that.  I have to approve it.  But when anybody comes to me that’s in charge of a particular department in any of our companies and they want to make a move, I ask questions.  But if I told the general manager that he can’t do what he wants to do, then obviously I have no confidence in the general manager.  So [I approve it],  maybe after a lot of questions.  
From my own point of view however, I really wasn’t happy last year but we blamed it on a lot of issues, and I think those issues were valid.  We felt that Peter deserved an opportunity. As far as I was concerned, it was an anomaly.  He’s a great coach, a great guy, works his butt off.  But I thought our training camp, quite frankly, was one of the worst training camps I’ve ever seen.  And I’m not talking about wins or losses.  There was nothing exciting.  Nobody shined.  Nobody looked good.  I couldn’t point to one thing that I thought was a positive coming out of training camp.  

Unfortunately my worries were realized in the first three games, scoring one goal in each game and looking disorganized.  If it weren’t for our goalies I think it would have been a lot worse.  Having said that, I still wouldn’t make a decision like that.  When Paul called me last night, late, and told me what he felt he was going to do this morning, obviously I thought about it and asked him a lot of questions, and approved it.

Last month you said Peter was not on the hot seat.  What changed?

To me, it was the training camp plus these three games, in my mind.  But it isn’t me that made that decision, I want to emphasize.

When Paul comes to you, what would be the first question you ask?

I would say tell me what your thoughts are.  And he did, and those are private.

Do you think three games was enough to give Laviolette a fair shot?

Well, as Paul said, it wasn’t three games.  It was training camp, and a little bit left over from last year.  And it’s not three losses, it’s the way our team played in those three losses. 

If the players don’t play hard enough, isn’t it an indictment on the players?

That’s what we’re going to find out.  Unfortunately in the business we’re in, the only way to find out is to make a change.  You can’t get rid of all the players.  This is why coaches lose their jobs, and sometimes lose them because of the players.  But we don’t know that until we make a change.  Sometimes we’re right and sometimes we’re wrong.  We think our players are better than they’ve looked.

So you fire the coach because you can’t get rid of the players?

Yes.  Show me a way to do that, we’ll be glad to do that instead.

Do you identify some of the players and get rid of them too?

Of course.  We don’t talk about getting rid of them.  We talk about can they play better, and why aren’t they.

Paul’s the one that brings in the players.  How do you evaluate his job?

I’ll let you know.  Right now we think we have better players than we’ve seen.

Does your confidence in Paul erode with something like this?

No.  I think Paul did an excellent job over the summer with the three players he brought in.  We had extremely high hopes for those three players and we still do.  It remains to be seen if we were right or wrong. 

On making the move three games into the season

Look, there’s no question in my mind that anybody looking at this from the outside looking in would say that three games is totally unfair.  But quite honestly, like I said, training camp was a disaster.  I’ve been at 47 training camps and I’ve never seen one that I thought was worse.  Now that’s not talking about Peter, that’s talking about our players.  And it carried right on over to the first three games of the season.  It’s not simply the three games that we saw.  There’s more to it than that.  

There’s a lot of things that I know that are private, but bottom line is that I have great respect for Peter Laviolette.  I’m sorry this has happened to him.  He’s a class act.  He’s done a great job for us, got us to the Stanley Cup Finals, within a game of winning the damn thing.  That’s why I love our culture, because we did get there.

Was there a sense of urgency that if this went on too long the season could slip away?

Yes.  It happened last year to us.  It was a short season, but we got off to a terrible start and we never recovered.  We’re in a tough business.  We’re in a fishbowl.  When somebody gets fired in a widget factory, nobody cares.  But when you’re in the fishbowl like this, and it’s news… I feel bad for Peter, and I feel sorry for his wife and kids.  He doesn’t deserve it as such, to have that type of negative press, because he’s done a great job since he’s been here.

On hockey being different than other sports in terms of long-term coaches (specifically Andy Reid mentioned)

You know, football coaches don’t usually last as long as Andy did.  He did a hell of a job for the Eagles.  He didn’t win a title, but I think everybody was happy with the job he did.  

The point I’m making is we’re happy to an extent that we’re in the playoffs most every year, and we’re happy to an extent that we’ve been in the Stanley Cup Finals many, many years when we didn’t win.  But we’re not thrilled, because we want to win a Stanley Cup.  But everybody wants to win a Stanley Cup, everybody wants to win a Super Bowl, everybody wants to win an NBA championship and everybody wants to win a World Series. Everybody. It isn’t easy.  But we never let it slide.  And we get criticized for it, rightly so, when you fire somebody after three games, and we expect criticism.  We deserve it.  But the bottom line is we’re trying to win.  And that’s why it’s been done.  

Because all we want to do is win for this city, win for our fans and win for our organization.  That’s what we’re trying to do.  There’s no secret here, there’s no devious thing here.  We feel horrible when you’ve gotta fire a guy like Peter Laviolette.  But the bottom line is we’re never going to quit.  We’re always going to try to win. 

On the training camp

It’s the same thing that you saw in our first three games.  It’s carried over from training camp.  I don’t have the magical answer.  Is it our players?  We’ll find out.  Was it the coach? Unfortunately, as I said before, we can’t fire the players.  So we have to find out, are we overrating our guys? We think we have good players.  We think we have a good team.  I don’t know if we’re overrating them.  I really don’t.

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