A Beautiful Day

Doug Risebrough has been fired as the Wild's GM. I haven't been this happy since Mason was fired.

It appears that Wild owner Craig Leipold actually wants to see this team win. And with Lemaire out, why not make it a completely clean slate?

Risebrough has had an absolutely terrible track record when it comes to the NHL Draft. Benoit Pouliot, taken in 2005, was famously sent down to the minors back in January. He was drafted before Marc Staal, TJ Oshie, and Devin Setoguchi. AJ Thelen, taken in '04, was also a complete bust.

Another thing - although at points I believed Lemaire's style wasn't working in Minnesota, it was really Risebrough who was smothering Lemaire. Poor draft picks, nonexistant trades, and a complete aversion to change handcuffed Lemaire. You can only do so much when you aren't given any scorers to play with. The fact that every single talented player on your team is "untouchable" when it comes to trades tells you that something isn't quite right. You can't trade the mediocre players for anything valuable. Also relying on the "young talent" on this team was ridiculous. Players like Colton Gilles and even James Sheppard could have used another year in Houston to hone their skills. Maybe then, Sheppard and Lemaire would've acutally gotten along. I was sad to see Lemaire go in the end, but now I'm even sadder, since I would've liked to see how Lemaire's style worked with some talent.

Hopefully getting a new GM in, who also gets to choose the new head coach will produce a gelled front office, with two people who are on the same page and can really rebuild this team to be less of a "boring team," as is the main complaint about the Wild from the rest of the country. I'm going to keep my fingers crossed, though...

A quick word about Lemaire leaving: something that bothered me about his departure was that it appears it was brought about because of lack of respect from the players. For some reason, this really got to me. I guess its because I see the Wild players as somewhat representative of Minnesota in a weird way. So when they have such giant rifts with their coach, or swear at him in front of the other players, it bugs me. From Russo:

Players have been getting frustrated with Lemaire. They’ve been talking back to him. There was an incident during practice Thursday when one player cursed at him. There’s been a big rift between he and James Sheppard, one Doug Risebrough had to get involved with. Players have been furious with the few days off.

Apparently the player who swore at Lemaire was Owen Nolan, which caught me by surprise, especially since he seems like such mature, team player.

Hey! There was already a "Fire Risebrough" tag on the blog. Shhhhhhhhoocking.