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03-24-2005, 04:56 PM
PRINCE GEORGE CITIZEN

Analysis by JIM SWANSON
Citizen Sports Editor

When you finish first, you get to tell the jokes. When you finish last, you end up as the punchline.
The Prince George Cougars are the Western Hockey League's jokebook, the only team to miss the playoffs the past two seasons, and certainly the only club in the 20-team loop to finish last in its division the past three campaigns.
"Yeah, you're an easy target when you're in fifth place, believe me," says Dallas Thompson, the general manager of the Cougars, who had a trying first season as a GM.
Just ask the Medicine Hat Tigers. There are enough people left in that organization, including the owners, to remember the five straight years (1997-98 through 2001-02) the season ended after Game 72, a very difficult feat to accomplish in a cyclical league like the WHL.
The questions now will dog the Cats through to the start of next season. In short, why did this team struggle so badly?
Why did the offence, so lauded in September, fail to click, producing a record-low 158 goals?
Why did the massive trades at the deadline, lauded as well, produce the exact opposite result?
And does the spiral ever end?
"Obviously, we have to do something about where we are," says Thompson, the team's assistant general manager in the other last-place seasons.
"We'll take some time here and look at things and find out where we go. Really, we did what we did, and that was finish fifth, but I don't think our team was a fifth-place team this year."
But it was.
Eerily, the Cougars finished this season with the exact same record - 26-41-3-2, an underwhelming .396 winning percentage - that was posted two seasons ago. Then-coach Ed Dempsey was told to get the team off to a good start next fall, but didn't, and in his seventh year he paid the price by being fired in early October.
If there is a noose, it's a lot closer to head coach Lane Lambert's neck than it is to anyone else's.
There is enough to question with Lambert's work - the scoring woes, the struggles on the power play, the apparent lack of drive and motivation this team showed too often. He got caught in bad line matchups, and seemed to be on the wrong side of officials instead of massaging them like veteran coaches Brent Sutter or Kevin Constantine. But his biggest mistake was not finding the right buttons and coaxing a consistent effort out of the team's best player, Dustin Byfuglien, who should have been a positive factor every game, rather than an 260-pound anchor slowing the ship. Lambert should have made Byfuglien a healthy scratch early in the season - for as many games as it took to get his attention, and get him in better condition - and that was left too late, when the team couldn't afford message-sending actions.
"Looking back at my first full year, it's been a tremendous learning experience," says Lambert. "When you go through adversity you learn a lot more than you do if everything's all rosy. When things aren't going well, you ask yourself what you can do better."
That said, what can't be argued by the people who make such decisions is that Lambert was hired and given a mandate to change the atmosphere, the culture, of a club that has never reached the next level. As Lambert says, Rome wasn't built in a day.
Remember, the last time the Cougars won a playoff series, the spring of 2000, Scott Myers was playing goal. In Prince George, the comparison can be made to Kelowna, where the Rockets went seven seasons without winning a playoff spot, then hired Marc Habscheid as coach in an effort to turn things around, a full 180.
"It's interesting when you talk about that, because Marc was one of the first guys I called when I came up to take the job," says Lambert.
"If you're trying to change a culture, and an attitude, often it's going to get worse before it gets better. There are players here who are used to the old way and who are going to resist the new way. When you're trying to change the culture in an organization, it's a two- to four-year process and I feel that we're on the right track with our younger players. We have some good young players here and I want to make sure they understand that what happened isn't acceptable.
"There are better days ahead for this hockey team. I feel strongly about that."
Lambert will not be replaced, that much has been confirmed by owner Rick Brodsky. That is welcome news for Lambert, who has maintained a professional approach despite the turmoil, facing critics in a respectful manner.
"I wouldn't be doing the job if I woke up every morning and was concerned about whether I was going to be fired or not," says Lambert. "I don't go to bed at night and lose sleep over whether I'm going to be fired. If I'm going to do that, I might as well look at getting a job somewhere else in a different profession.
"Obviously, when a team finishes in fifth place, not only this year but three years in a row, there are going to be questions asked and answers looked for."
But it's not the coach who takes dumb penalties, or misses open nets, or fails to take care of a defensive chore. The 19-year-olds on this team did not produce, and the overage situation was a mess from the beginning. Without veterans to lead the way, junior hockey teams flounder. Unlike the past, Lambert didn't shy away from sending some of the younger players - especially Nick Drazenovic, Greg Gardner, Ty Wishart, Dan Gendur and Evan Fuller - on the ice in any situation, a bravado that should pay off down the road.
When you finish fifth again, and again and again, it takes more than one area to fail. The coaching change was made in 2003 because no tangible success had been recorded through nearly two complete cycles. Captain Myles Zimmer spoke about how the ship had been tightened, with professionalism and responsibility now required of the players, but even the owner is wondering if the scouting and evaluation process is flawed.
No question, the scouts need a magnifying glass aimed in their direction - are the 19 players eligible to return good enough to form a winning team?
"One thing I really try to guard against is having our people overestimate our players, and I guess we're all kinda guilty of that," says Brodsky.
"I don't think. really, we deserved to end up where we were, there's no doubt about that, yet I look at some of the players. Those are the sorts of things that when we meet, we'll discuss. We can't have a system that takes a potential 40-goal scorer and makes a 25-goal scorer out of him."
Thompson's deal-making at the trade deadline earned him plaudits around the league, with one problem - the club was 8-21-0-1 after the moves were made.
"We were one game under .500 before Christmas, and I sure thought we were going to take off, with or without the trades," says Thompson. "I thought we were a couple guys away. There were many times where we had chances to go up more on Kamloops, and it wasn't there when we needed it. (We couldn't put them away), kinda like the power play, you have a chance to put someone away and you don't."