Habscheid could plot better outcome for the Royals

Steve Ewen, The Province
Published: Friday, September 23, 2011
The last the time the WHL had a home in Victoria, it was a raucous disaster.

The Victoria Cougars were so bad on the ice and so disorganized in the front office that they may have taken years off the life of the Victoria Memorial Arena, the rink known as the Barn on Blanshard that was demolished in 2003. The team had pulled up stakes in 1994, moving to Prince George.

The league is returning this season, looking to capitalize in the capital city in the rink that replaced the Barn, the Save-On-Foods Memorial Centre, with the Victoria Royals, the athletes formerly known as the Chilliwack Bruins.

Their home opener is Saturday, versus the Vancouver Giants.

So have we seen this movie before? WHL power brokers will tell you that the setting is the same, but the characters and the plot are different.

There's an argument. The old Cougars, at the end of their run, never had a Marc Habscheid behind their bench.

They had Wayne Naka, who had success coaching in the B.C. Junior league. The same with Rick Hopper. They had Archie Henderson, who had made it to the playoffs behind the bench one year in the East Coast League. They had Lyle Moffat, who was a decent winger with the Winnipeg Jet in their WHA days, and they had Gary Cunningham, who had a couple of sips of coffee manning the blue line with the WHA's Edmonton Oilers.

With that quintet behind the bench over the last five seasons in Victoria, the Cougars were 68-276-16. Included in that was maybe the worst season in league history, a 5-65-2 effort in 1989-90 that still holds WHL marks for fewest points, most losses and fewest wins in a 68-or-moregame season.

No wonder the team was drawing 1,750 fans per game, according to the Victoria Times-Colonist, by that final 1993-94 season. Keep in mind, this was an educated hockey market, one with many folks who had seen the Cougars, led by Grant Fuhr and Barry Pederson, go 60-11-1 in 1980-81, a campaign that still holds the league record for most victories.

A little further down that mostwins chart is Habscheid's 2002-03 Kelow na Rockets, who went 51-14-6-1 and captured the WHL crown. Just behind that is his 2003-04 Rocket team that went 47-21-4-0, lost in the third round of the playoffs but won the Memorial Cup out of the host position.

He had a stint with Hockey Canada, including coaching the world junior team in 2003. He worked as an associate coach with the Boston Bruins.

He's one of the top five coaches in the WHL. It would be hard to have tagged anyone from that aforementioned Cougar group with that title.

Habscheid understands building a program for the long haul rather than moulding a team for one year.

Once he gets ideal and work habits in place, his teams tend to be work-together, hard-to-play-against units.

It's not very often that Part II is dramatically better than Part I, but this might be one of those cases.