GM, board have a lot of damage to repair
Mike Davies looks at how, and why, this season went so wrong for the Petes
Leadership in any organization starts at the top.
When an organization fails, responsibility shouldn’t fall on its foot soldiers. Such is the case with the Peterborough Petes’ dismal 2017-18 season.
When team personnel meet media for post-season interviews you get glimpses of truth but never the full story. For players there is the code of the dressing room – keep problems behind closed doors. For coaches, management, ownership, there is sensitivity of dealing with young men. They’ll rarely throw individual players under the bus.
Let’s not mince words. This season was a disaster, a complete and utter failure when you compare expectations to results.
On Nov. 1, the Petes looked ready to fulfill lofty expectations after appearing in last year’s Eastern Conference final. They were 10-5-1 and had won convincingly against Hamilton, Kingston and Oshawa, teams they were expected to compete with for first place. They looked like the class of the conference.
It’s almost inconceivable that five months later they missed the playoffs, placing 17th of 20 teams.
At the first sign of adversity this year the team crumbled and never recovered.
Recurring themes from exit interviews were that the team lacked unity and their defence wasn’t good enough. A lack of cohesion off the ice was said to have spilled onto the ice and leadership wasn’t what it was last year.
More practically, the defence, a question mark coming into the season, was their weakness.
While players bear responsibility, no one is absolved when the failure is this deep, and the lack of leadership has to be traced higher.
It’s management’s job to not just scout on-ice abilities of players but to understand each player’s character. These are not fully formed people they’re drafting. It falls on coaches, management, ownership to provide an environment that instills and guides leadership and protects that environment. When threats to that environment emerge they must be dealt with or removed. It can’t wait until after the season.
If team chemistry and leadership were issues it happened under the watch of the adults in charge who were either slow to recognize the signs or failed to act on them.
Head coach Jody Hull paid for some failures by losing his job. It is GM Mike Oke’s job to remove excuses for the coaches. Yet, at the end of the year the defence issue remained unaddressed.
We hear from management how difficult it is to make trades. How many moving parts are involved; dynamics like no-trade clauses, education packages and team needs lining up to make a fit.
No one is suggesting it’s easy to make trades but there were 49 in the OHL between June 20 and the Christmas trade embargo and another 28 between Dec. 28 and the Jan. 10 deadline.
That’s 77 trades involving 144 teams or 7.2 per team. The Petes made four, with Tyler Rollo’s move a necessity because of too many overage players.
Dealing Jonne Tammela’s rights did nothing to impact this season. Austin Osmanski was a necessity during an injury spree. While a serviceable defenceman, he wasn’t the impact player the blue-line desperately needed. The Jonathan Ang deal was the only real attempt to alter team dynamics, after much of the damage was done.
Fans don’t want to hear how hard it is to make trades. They want results. Hockey is a resultsoriented business. Management is judged on its ability to identify problems and remove them or identify weaknesses and address them. On both counts not nearly enough was done this season.
It is now Oke’s job to replace Hull, to improve through the draft but also to make necessary changes to change the dressing room dynamics. Oke was clearly the board’s choice when his contract was extended and Hull’s was not. Now Oke and the board are on the hot seat moving forward.