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Thread: Arling speaks out about Chynoweth, Hunchak and the fans

  1. #1
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    Default Arling speaks out about Chynoweth, Hunchak and the fans

    from the Prairie Post:
    (This is the second part of reporter George Bowditch’s conversation with Swift Current Broncos’ board of director’s member Joe Arling. In this interview, Arling has a lot to say about the Broncos, their playoff chances and expectations of the team and the coaching staff):
    Joe Arling continues to comment on the question of: The fans keep commenting about Dean Chynoweth’s apparent lack of emotion on the bench. Is that a fair statement?“Dean comes from that pro environment and quite frankly, I have been around this league for a long time and those who have gotten to know Dean here in the community would clearly understand that there isn’t a more passionate man who is coaching the game today, or in a past history of where he has played. He was a captain in the Western Hockey League, captain of a Memorial Cup team and his style of play was passionate and extremely emotional and he is an emotional guy. He has learned to control those emotions on the bench. Comment from the fans? I respect the comments but to correlate more emotion meaning more wins and therefore the players playing better? No, I don’t buy that. They (fans) have their right to offer the comment. That will not be the difference of whether or not Dean is or isn’t the coach or manager in to the future of the team.
    ”Dean’s managerial expertise has never been questioned as far as recognizing talent and that sort of thing. Should he be more involved in the management duties and switching coaching duties?
    Joe Arling: “Dean is our CEO. He is the guy who is the captain of the ship. He has to balance his duties between management and coaching. Coaching is a passion for Dean and he readily admits that. Now as a package there were a number of areas that we had concerns in from the previous administration. First of all right at the top of the list, was community relations - and do you know what? Dean is incredibly approachable and for those who have gotten to know him in this community, he is out there, visible and very, very approachable.For some of the critics, they just picked up the phone and said, ‘Dean, you know I would like to have a coffee with you,’ and he would accommodate them. This is a guy that will sit down and talk with you. He has done a great job in the community. The management component internally in the office and the scouting and the community relations with the players has been exceptional, so those are the parts and some of the things that the fans see and some of it they don’t.The actual hockey operations itself, the on and off ice product takes the remainder of his time. Coaching takes up 20 to 25 per cent of all his duties but the visible part for the fans is the 80 to 95 per cent of it. So that is the easiest thing to criticize and or take a run at. I respect you saying, ‘You know what? Dean’s management skills are not being questioned here, it is whether or not the coaching part of it is there or not.’ I am going to go a little further into this and suggest to you that at the end of the day is this team where the pundits or the experts predicted it to be? We are dead on. Were we overachieving sitting in second place? The Regina Pats quite frankly, dramatically were under- achieving.I look at a team like Brandon as an example; they have 13 19- and 20-year-olds. The Swift Current Broncos have seven. So it is a very mature, older hockey club so you can’t make mistakes against them. We have played very well against them this year. But where I am going with this is Regina and Brandon were expected to be one-two in the league. Everybody else had us battling for fourth or missing the playoffs. So are we slotted where we should be? We are right where we should be. The development of our players we knew was going to take time and that is exactly what is happening. We are having our struggles at a time when all the other teams in our division had their struggles before Christmas including the Regina Pats, including Prince Albert, including Saskatoon. So we are right in the battle, right where we should be.Are we disappointed from where we were? I wouldn’t be sitting here telling you I am happy about it. Certainly we are disappointed and Dean is disappointed, our management is disappointed, but you know what? This is the time when you really measure the true character of your players and you measure the character of your organization, because the most important quality to have is resiliency. You have got to be able to battle back and dig yourself back. The one thing quite frankly that we don’t have is enough years. We have so many young people that have to be put in to critical situations that over and over again there can be a law of diminishing returns, so they have got to dig themselves out of a hole and add on to that as we have referenced. The goaltending in some of those nights has not been where it should be to be successful in our league ... so as a result we have this amplitude that I talked about earlier of the real good games, and then we go to a low here where we get beat at home by four or five goals. Our fans have been spoiled. Am I disappointed on those nights? Incredibly disappointed. But I can say this - that we are on the right track.
    ”So you are saying that you are going to “stay the course” Joe?
    Joe Arling: We are “staying the course”. Dean has a three-year contract and we are “staying the course.”At this point, evaluations will be made at the end of the year on all aspects of the team and the management team itself and that is the community relations, that is the management component of it and it is the coach component of it. Those are some of the decisions that we have to make, but in terms of the development of the team and the development of the players, goodness me, I am going to go back here a couple of years and at the end of the day... I will even go back to Randy’s (Smith) years specifically. I will maybe address the situation of emotion and volatility on the bench. Fans again who have been with us a long time, one of the knocks against Randy, there were two knocks against Randy and quite frankly to Todd (McClelland) to a degree was we were a two-line hockey club. All we ever saw were the top two lines and never any development of our young people.You know what? Dean plays everybody and that is one of the reasons we are going to have success in the big picture when it all gets dusted down to it. Even to our ninth to our eleventh forwards and our fifth and sixth defenceman are going to be able to play impact minutes against the other team’s top lines, so everybody does play indeed and that is why the players like playing for him.Secondly, to the issue of showing more emotion and volatility, and again I am going to Randy and I am not picking on Randy Smith specifically, but as you know he was a very volatile coach and he was very, very emotional. Well, I am going to remind our fans going back three years ago - what did you see running around the ice but Jeremy Williams and Whitey (Ian White) and Tyler Redenbach at times chasing the referee around the ice because they are pissed off about calls and they are emotional and they are all fired up, but at the end of the day there was a law of diminishing return. Our players play the game. You play the way you are coached and from the expectation.Dave (Hunchak) and Dean are both very, very controlled on the bench. You take the calls the referee gives you. You take the bounces in the game and you get ready for the next play and that is for me the strengths there that I see.

  2. #2
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    The clamoring is for assistant coach Dave Hunchak to get a chance. Do you think you will lose him if you don’t give him a chance?
    Joe Arling: Again as you know, I came from the Western Hockey League in a past life and I think assistant coaches are looking for an option or an opportunity, and Dave’s past history says that he is a very capable head coach. Dave will have to make that decision as to when or if he decides to leave the hockey club and take the best situation that is advantageous for him.One of the things that is about the hockey business that is different from the business world is if those opportunities are presented, you know what? If you have been mentored in an organization and you move on, people are happy for you in the hockey fraternity. In the business world, they build fences around people. In our world, if somebody has the ability to move up, they are endorsed get out there and paddle your own canoe. It is your own ship, so Dave will have to pick his spot. We will operate and again I use the term Dean is our CEO. He operates the hockey club and it will ultimately be his decision to retain Dave and say, ‘Look, here are the options or opportunities for you’ and if somebody comes knocking and asks for permission to speak to Dave Hunchak then we are going to be pleased for him too. At the end of the day for those that are thinking that this change should be made immediately or are looking at that as a potential option, I guess that would have to be determined into the spring and into the fall depending on how this structures in to the new contracts that we will ultimately evaluate on.
    ”Do you feel that the fans are pushing the panic button and are expecting too much too soon considering where the organization was three years ago and where it is today?
    Joe Arling: “You know what? They wouldn’t be fans if they didn’t have a high expectation. I have a high expectation. I am disappointed. Dean is disappointed. We are not happy with what has happened over the last six weeks, but at the end of the day at Christmas time we weren’t having this conversation. We were going “Man oh man! The hockey club is humming along nicely and we are doing just fine.”The Crowley trade is being brought up as a potential anchor of this situation right. If we still had Dane Crowley in the lineup and there is no question, we gave up an impact player. What ended up happening there for a fan to understand it, is if you assume Crowley was our number one or number two defenceman. You put Rumsey and Crowley at one-two and you put R.J. (LaRochelle) and (Michael) Wilson for example at three-four and you take Crowley out of there everybody has to move up one notch there, and then you have got to depend upon the four 17- year-olds and throwing (Eric) Doyle into that mix to fit into numbers four to six, and really a lot of those young guys should be your five-six defenceman.We have lost a key ingredient in our end of the rink. At the end of the day, Dane Crowley was going to play another 20-25 games for us. With the trade, what we got was an outstanding offensive defenceman that has been recognized the 23rd best North American skater in the National Hockey League Entry Draft. By the time you add the Europeans it probably puts him in to the late first round or early second round pick. That is an outstanding trade. Has it impacted on the short-term? Yes it has, but I would like our fans to understand that there is a bigger picture here and that we are seeing the bigger picture.Yes, the Dane Crowley trade has had an impact, but do we believe at the end of the day our young players will be better for all this when it is all said and done? Yes, they will be, but these are the growing pains that you have to live with When you reference past history and I will go to our competitor down the road a hundred and forty mile to the west in Medicine Hat. The number of years they had first round picks because they were finishing in last place and they missed the playoffs and I am going to say five or six years in a row before they got on this roll that they are on, and they have impact players because they picked for so many years in the first two or three picks and they finally got it all together.They will cycle again but at the end of the day the fans had given up on them and everything else, and that is an outstanding hockey club and it is a good organization. At the end of the day our blip on the radar to recover has been one or two years. We missed the playoffs one year and we are battling in here and we are getting it turned around. Look how long it took them to get it turned around.On the flip side of it I will go a hundred miles to the east of us here and look at the volatility in that complete organization. If you go back in history to when they were the Winnipeg Warriors in the 80s, I don’t have that number in front of me but I would suggest that that organization has missed the playoffs 50 percent of the time since they have been a franchise - maybe less - because of volatility at the management level, volatility at the board level and volatility at the coaching level. Goodness that is an organization that fired Mike Babcock who is one of the best coaches in the National Hockey League who has won a World Junior Championship; he was Coach of the Year at the end of the day. That became a reactionary decision to fire him. Give me a break.So the one thing we have in Swift Current is stability as an organization at the board level. I know I referenced this at the time we hired Dean, we were open for coaches and we had 73 coaching and management applications. I felt there was 15 legitimate ones and besides Marc Habscheid, there was three other coaches who had coached the World Junior Team and one guy that was a head coach of a National Hockey League team. My question to them was “Why Swift Current?”“Because of your reputation as an organization and your reputation for stability and not being reactionary. You are a model in the hockey fraternity.” The problem is in your own back yard. Many times the criticisms that are leveled are based a lot on emotion and based upon the wins and losses, but there are and there is a bigger picture. We are going through the growing pains of the reshuffling that we have started really three years ago. The year we missed the playoffs was just a matter of fact. Now this Dean’s team, this is Dean’s scouting program and he is now going to see the results of that. We hope that he is going to be able to go forward with us but at the end of the day I am trying to point out here that if we became reactionary and listened to and just observed on the wins and losses only and the element of the scores, we would not have a franchise here because it would not have made it because of the volatility at the board level and we just refuse to get in to that.
    ”How is Dean Chynoweth as a person handling this? I know it is affecting him and I know it is bothering him.
    Joe Arling- “Because I was a coach in this league and a manager, I know for myself personally you take so much of this on as your responsibility. Anybody who is good at what they do and are the captain of the ship. You assume responsibility for all of those that are part of the organization both on and off the ice and at times you look in the mirror and go “Have I let anybody down here? What could I do differently to modify it?” Dean is no different. Has it affected him? Absolutely. At the end of the day he aches right with everybody else on this but to me it is easy to get on a role and win eight, nine, ten games in a row or if the score is four to one and score the next four goals to win eight to one. Quite frankly for me, your measure as a coach or a manager or player is what are you doing when you had to recover from the down times and you go through a slump. How quickly can you get out of it? Are your players still buying in? Are they still competing for you? What are you going to do to make a difference? Dean has been down enough roads both at the junior level and the pro level as a coach that at the end of the day, the resiliency component of it for us and I think for him is huge. Do we see resiliency there? Absolutely! We see him being able to pull this together.

  3. #3
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    ”There have been some people that have threatened not to renew their season tickets. What do you say when you hear that?
    Joe Arling- “I guess I get a little frustrated with the comment. I can appreciate subjectivity and the emotion of the moment and quite frankly in a couple of games I am no different than anybody else. I am grinding and I am going “Oh man oh man! This was tough night.” I really want to remind our fans that are saying that. Get by the emotion of a particular run or a stretch of a two or three game loss here. The bigger picture here is we are moving forward on the big picture as an organization. It is crucial in our small market and that is the key here. We don’t have the luxury of at the end of the day if we have so many people that say that we won’t have a team. Every time we go on a five-game losing streak and somebody says, “Well, fire the coach.” You know what? We are not going to be here. Swift Current is a model in the Western Hockey League. We are envied by the way we do business by our partners in the league and at the end of the day our stability stands the test. We try to get by the emotion of the moment and the comments like that. I just want to remind our fans that we need every single fan that we have got and we need you to be a hard core fan to the point that you are going to with it through thick and thin and not picking your spot. Quite frankly, the majority - 99 per cent of our fans I firmly believe, maybe it is 99.9 per cent will firmly be there night in a night out for us as long as we give them a competitive product and they have got to believe that the chance is there to be able to win and our players are going to compete and play hard. If they don’t play hard and then that is a different story and we are not competing at the highest level possible then they are fair comments.”



    http://www.prairiepost.com/index.php...=793&Itemid=28

  4. #4
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    wow that is a long read. Easier to pick up a paper and read it. Nothing really suprising though.

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