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
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