The variety of reactions to the Keenan hiring are diverse among bloggers and press pundits alike. Duncan is ruled primarily by disgust. Kyle, Matt and I are of the "Yay!...I think..." mindset. Reactions on messageboards range from "love it!" to "NOOOOOOOO!"
Even the "pros" in the press are having a hard time agreeing as well.
George Johnson from the Calgary Herald thinks the move smells of nepotism, desperation and scapegoating.
"He is the perfect solution to take our team to the next level,'' former protege Darryl Sutter gushed at Thursday's media conference (conveniently forgetting Keenan hasn't taken any team to any discernible level since 1994).
"Mike and Jimmy (Playfair) and myself, together we hope to do something remarkable for our organization.''
Sutter's sugar-tinted nostalgia aside, this gamble is large.
Johnson has some salient points, but they tend to be clouded by his penchant for excusing Playfair's failures to the point of skewing reality.
But, despite the rather delusional belief around the city limits, the Flames are only a serviceable team buoyed by a superstar power forward and an other-worldly goaltender. Sorry, people, to burst your bubble.
I dealt with this hokum back in April when the Flames were bounced from the play-offs. I think the argument bears repeating in light of Johnson's re-assertion that Calgary "just wasn't that good".
1.) The "delusional belief" that the Flames were a potential cup contender wasn't limited to the city limits at the onset of last season. THN, Sports Illustrated and most other hockey prognosticators fingered Calgary to be the favorites of the NW division. Hell, most Oilers bloggers and avowed enemies to the Flames grudgingly admitted Calgary would likely be a top 5 team in the Western Conference. To smear the reasonable expectation that the Flames would be a strong team as some sort of homer induced hysteria is dishonest.
2.) The Calgary Flames are no longer a 2 player team. Calgary was the first club in the league to have four 70 point players last year. Aside from Anaheim, the Flames probably had the most enviable top 4 defencemen in the WC last year with Hamrlik, Phaneuf, Stuart and Regehr. Alex Tanguay was an elite forward in terms of ES production last year. As was Juice, in terms of PP production. Had Johnson written this about the 03/04 Flames, it would be accurate. However, applying it to the 06/07 club is disingenuous and just plain wrong.
As you might guess, Johnson thinks the move is a bad one. He contends that Keenan is a bull in a china shop and has the potential to pretty much ruin the Franchise.
On the other side of the coin, we have the gushing of TSN analyst Bob McKenzie:
Keenan has an outstanding hockey team in Calgary with outstanding pieces to put together. I think it's a great move.
Notice that McKenzie considers the Flames "outstanding". Hmmm...does he summer in Calgary George?
Of course, then there is the always sensible Eric Duhatschek who seems to straddle the fence between optimism and pessimism, although his piece does tends to higlight the potential pitfalls of Iron Mike's upcoming reign:
As a general rule of thumb, the 57-year-old Keenan generally favours older, more experienced players. The Flames' willingness to give him an eighth coaching assignment in the NHL, in a year when Jarome Iginla, Miikka Kiprusoff and others are in the final years of their contracts, suggests there won't be a whole lot of experimenting or building for the future.
And if things don't go Calgary's way in 2007-08, the foundation of the organization could collapse upon itself, with players flocking toward the exits.
It's interesting to see the pendulum of opinion swing so wildly in and around the hockey community. Oilers fans are laughing their heads off, convinced Keenan is basically the Flames death-knell. Some Flames fans are kicking chairs in anger and others are jumping for joy. Even the published punditry are polarized on this issue. The one certainty heading into next year, it seems, is the high-risk, high-reward nature of this gamble: either the Flames will experience wild success or near total destruction. Myself, I like to think that the former is more probable even though I can't entirely discount the latter as completely impossible.
