Blazers hire coach

The Kamloops Blazers - the last WHL team without a coach for the 08-09 season - will have one this afternoon. Gregg Drinnan has the story here....the new bench boss of the team will be former NHL assistant coach Barry Smith.

The 47 year-old Smith has very little head coaching experience - one season in the ECHL and one season in the USHL - but has been near-continuously employed over the last ten seasons as an assistant coach in the NHL, AHL, IHL, and ECHL. Most recently he was an assistant with the Vancouver Canucks for the past four seasons before being fired in May in new Canucks G.M. Mike Gillis' purge of the coaching staff.

Smith has zero experience with junior hockey apart from that one very unsuccessful (his team finished with a .333 record) year in the USHL.....we'll have to see how he adapts to the WHL and coaching teenagers instead of men.

One other note - Seattle lost their NBA team yesterday after an agreement was reached to move the Sonics to Oklahoma City for next season. The effect on the Thunderbirds is probably minor since they have already agreed to move to a new building in Kent midseason next year.....although losing the Sonics does open up the possibility that at least a few Seattleites who previously attended Sonics games might now spend their newly-available disposable income on the Birds next year instead. This also leaves Key Arena largely vacant now with two of their three major tenants gone. (I believe the only other major tenant of Key Arena is the WNBA?).

Also, the Alberta major midget league has finally put their final 07-08 stats up on their website. I'm not going to update all the team prospect postings (linked on the left side) with the AMHL stats, but if you want to look up the numbers for some of your team's prospects in the AMHL, you can see the stats at this link.