I just want to thank the Atlanta Thrashers for playing as well as they did the last third of the season. The Thrashers were 12-21-5 on December 31st. They were widely regarded the worst team in the NHL with no foreseeable success any time soon. They had a star player who seemingly didn't want to be there and a front office that could care less about the team.
Starting in the New Year though the Thrashers were a different team. At the beginning of the season new coach John Anderson said that it was going to take a while for his methods to be successfully implemented, and he wasn't kidding. As a huge hockey fan and Thrashers fan the 1st 3 months of the season were brutally hard to watch. We could stop another teams offense even if we sacrificed any semblance of an offensive game to do it. But things turned around. The Thrashers play their last game of the season tomorrow night at home against Tampa bay and at best they will finish 3rd from the bottom in the conference with 74-76 points. While that may not seem like much, the Thrashers looked like they were going to be way worse. Their record at the moment is 34-41-6 meaning they went 22-20-1 the last half of the season. An incredible turnaround for a team that was mired in apathy before the New Year. The new found success was even better from the middle of February onward where the Thrash went 14-9-1 down the stretch to pull themselves out of the cellar. During this turnaround it is isn't coincidental that Ilya Kovalchuk had been named captain. He went from being talked about for not producing to vaulting into the top ten in goals and points.
All of this change the past couple months has given Thrashers fans hope for the future. There is a rock solid core consisting of Kovalchuk (26) Bryan Little (21) Colby Armstrong (25) Zach Bogosian (18!) Nathan Oystrik (26) Rich Peverly (26) and the rest of the defense in which no one is over 28 years old.
Things are looking up.
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