| Draped in a
travel-rumpled cream trench coach, and looking for all the world like Columbo, Terry
Slater slumped dejectedly Wednesday, and pulled bits of paper napkins from his pockets.
Scrawled on the napkins in runny black in were names of players he has and players he
wishes he could get. And there were combinations of names put together into new lines.
There was a lot of busy work, enough to have kept the mind occupied during a long flight
back from Calgary, and to have dulled the anguish. "What's
happened - and I could see it coming - is that all these other teams started getting a lot
better about Christmas," Slater says. "Their experienced guys got sharpened and
in shape and now they're playing a lot better. But we don't have the experience and we're
making the same old mistakes." The Stingers has just returned from a two game trip
into Canada, during which they lost two games - 5-2 at Edmonton Sunday and 3-2 at Calgary
Tuesday. All together they have lost five straight now. "If there were ever two teams
we could have beaten on the road, it was this two," Slater sighs. "They were
nothing. They didn't play well at all. We gave them victories like Christmas
presents."
It happened that way, Slater says, "because we made the same
old mistakes ... the same mistakes we've been making all year....the the same mistakes we
make almost every game. This team doesn't learn. Nobody is out-playing us," he goes
on. "We're skating and shooting as well as the best teams in this league. But we're
making silly little mistakes and giving away goals. We're doing things wrong that you
should learn to do right in the pee-wees. And I've told them and told them and told
them," he says softly, shaking his head. "It's difficult team to coach. They sit
and listen very patiently when you talk to them and then they go out and do the same
things wrong game after game. What's wrong is we've got a lot of good young stallions but
not enough experience."
"In the Calgary game, we should have beaten them easily, but we
give them two goals in the last period and that's it. Before all three goals they scored,
one of our guys had the puck on his stick but gave it away. Now our whole game plan going
in there was to clear that puck as soon as we touched it. I told them don;t worry about
making the pass, use the boards and just clear the puck to the other end of the ice. But
our young stallions, they want to do everything themselves. They get the puck and they
want to make the prefect pass with it. The delay for a second and then one of these smart,
veteran players come in on them and the next thing you know, it's a goal. I don't know
what to do at this point," Slater confesses. "I tell them, but if they don;t
listen to me...."
So that he does something, though, besides sit around and fret,
Slater draws on paper napkins and designs new lines. "It's just some thing to
try," he explains. "You're got to do something." The new lines now are:
Pierre Guite, Bryan Campbell and Rick Dudley; then Dennis Sobchuk, Jacques Locas and
Murray Myers; then Gene Sobchuk at center of the third line, with who knows who at wings.
"I've still got to make a decision on that," coach says.
And another napkin, the one he won't show, is the one with other
players. "This is just a list of people I'd like to have," he explains.
"I'm going to give it to Bill (DeWitt, vice president). "We need a right wing
badly. We really need one. Then some others." Slater folds up his tattered napkins
and sticks them back in his rumples pocket, and then he is off again, speaking as he
leaves about the game going up Friday, at home against Edmonton. "The worst thing in
the world is losing," he has said. "And the only thing that can make you happy
again is winning." |
