More Hawks hooey today, thanks again to majority owner Jim Goldsmith's bumbling management style and his big mouth. Read the story in today's Portland Tribune.
OK, Management 101: Communication is very important. Apparently, this front office has little to none since Goldsmith is telling the press that he's going to replace Ken Hodge as G.M. and move Hodge to scouting full-time, but Hodge knows nothing about it. Honestly, Ken Hodge should tell Goldsmith to !*&% off and just quit. Why is he putting up with this garbage treatment from this buffoon? Is it because he wants to get the rest of his money out of the sale? He must surely be ruing the day he ever heard Jim Goldsmith's name.
Secondly, Goldsmith just publicly called the people who hold his arena lease "pigs". I'm sure that will encourage them to want to renegotiate.
I don't get this guy....he has made some money in his life so he must have some business sense, but so far we haven't seen any of it when it comes to running his hockey team.
To the team's on-ice performance now, an amazing (and somewhat depressing) stat, courtesy of blog reader Jon Whiting: When Portland opened the scoring last Friday night in their eventual 3-2 loss to Vancouver, that represented the first time the Hawks had been in the lead in a game since they opened the scoring against Spokane on January 21. That's a span of 32 days and over 13 games, a total of 827:51 of playing time. I don't think the league keeps stats on that, but it's got to be up there for longest drought of all-time without holding a lead.
Which brings up the next question: in the all-time annals of the WHL, where do this year's and last year's Hawks rank among the worst teams? Not just in terms of wins & losses, but in how badly they lose? To figure this out, I took all the standings going back to 78-79 and calculated how many goals each team scored each year for every goal they gave up. A team with a value of 2, for example, scored twice as many as they gave up. Using that stat, the ten worst WHL teams of the last 30 years are:
89-90 Victoria Cougars: 221GF, 565GA = 0.391
79-80 Great Falls Americans: 73GF, 186GA = 0.392
83-84 Winnipeg Warriors: 239GF, 580GA = 0.412
07-08 Portland Winter Hawks: 112GF, 260GA = 0.431
90-91 Victoria Cougars: 201GF, 437GA = 0.46
06-07 Portland Winter Hawks: 146GF, 316GA = 0.462
03-04 Saskatoon Blades: 140GF, 279GA = 0.502
81-82 Spokane Flyers: 102GF, 196GA = 0.52
04-05 Regina Pats: 154GF, 285GA = 0.54
01-02 Vancouver Giants: 198GF, 365GA = 0.542
The 79-80 Americans and 81-82 Flyers are asterisk teams since they both folded mid-season those years. And the 01-02 Giants were an expansion team that year and can be cut some slack for being bad.
But, you can see that this year's Portland team (so far) is 4th-worst, with last year's being 6th-worst.
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