Games 707, 708, 709 …

Sunday, March 16, 2008: Brampton 5, Kingston 3

Friday, March 14, 2008: Kingston 9, Sudbury 2

Wednesday, March 12, 2008: Ottawa 2, Kingston 1

Real life got in the way of commenting on the last three games, which is no great loss. The Frontenacs are done for the season; Nathan Moon got to 35 goals and it looks like Josh Brittain will be a decent draft choice.

There’s a lot to be done. The Frontenacs need an overhaul top to bottom. Let them know what you think; don’t be happy just with a coaching change.

 

Game 701…

Saturday, March 1, 2008: Kingston 5, Peterborough 2

Mavric Parks could have had all three stars. Fifty-one saves? Granted, the goalie of the future needed to get a lot of shots to make up for all the time he’s spent on the bench while the genius GM-coach was giving most of the starts to play an overager in net during what’s supposed to be a rebuilding season.

The Fronts will probably be X’d out on Thursday when they go back to play the Petes.

 

Best name in the game…

…. goes to former Frontenac Bobby Bolt. Wow, better than Bear Trapp? That’s an upset.

 

Mav’s a killer! (The Fronts are a mess)

As you saw, Larry Mavety got an indefinite suspension for leaving the bench during Sunday’s game vs. Plymouth.

Hopefully it lasts over a couple weeks. Isn’t this the time of year where guys Mav’s age like to take off to someplace sunny and warm?

It was  stupid that he went on the ice … stupid awesome.

Some people are agreeing that it’s too bad Sunday could not have been the final Frontenacs game at the Memorial Centre. It was a lulu.

 

Well, at least he was on a good airline

This has nothing to do with the current Frontenacs … but does someone know if David Cornacchia, the former Belleville Bull and minor leaguer who was arrested last week “after allegedly slapping a flight attendant, head-butting a passenger and exposing himself on an American Airlines flight from Toronto to Dallas,” is the son of Rick Cornacchia, who coached the old Kingston Canadians and Oshawa during the Eric Lindros era?

It’s no laughing matter for the younger Cornacchia, but is hilarious if you know much about Rick Cornacchia, assuming it is is his son. (How many Cornacchias in hockey can there be, anyways?) The old man was known to be a bit pigheaded and pushy with people. Apparently, now it’s come back on him …. he has family being publicly shamed and facing a pretty serious criminal charge. Forgive anyone who sees this as “funny” rather than “sad.”

Best line comes from the Rink Rat forum:

The strangest part is that all this happened in front of Bill Prisniak, but he didn’t see a thing.

(Prisniak is a ref in the league; anyone who’s been to a game would be familiar with his work.)

Seriously, here’s hoping David Cornacchia is OK. He’ll get his day in court. Does anyone know how the courts in the States treat these kind of cases? I can’t imagine they’re too lenient, since we’re talking about allegedly jeopardizing the safety of people at 20,000 feet.

 

The Zack attack

At this point, the state of the Frontenacs defence is such that any acquisition should be applauded, so welcome aboard, Zack Fenwick.

It’s dawned on the Frontenacs that they need to do something about their defence. They now have 10 d-men on the roster, although half of them are injured. (Of course, quality is better than quantity.)

Fenwick, who’d left the team at Mercyhurst College in Pennsylvania, is an ‘89, so he has at least a year and a half left in the OHL and at 6-foot-2, 207 pounds he offers some size.  

Who knows how ready he is to step in the lineup, though? Fenwick wasn’t playing regularly for Mercyhurst, which is middle-of-the-pack in one of the weakest conferences in NCAA Division 1. I wouldn’t draw any conclusions based on that; it could have been politics or the coaches being loyal to older players.

By the way, former Frontenac Phil Mangan was traded in the Quebec League yesterday, from Moncton to St. John’s. It shouldn’t be lost on anyone that Mangan had managed to go plus-8 on a team that’s been outscored on the season. Think the Frontenacs could have used an overage centre who takes care of business at both ends of the rink?

 

Just who is Kingston’s best hockey team?

The respective winning percentages of Kingston’s main hockey teams are pretty telling today:

Voyageurs, Tier Junior A: .816 (15-3-1)
Royal Military College, OUA: .786 (5-1-1)
Queen’s, OUA, .357 (2-4-1)
Frontenacs, OHL: .300 (4-10-1)

Doesn’t this just beg for a four-team Challenge Cup tournament to be held to find out who’s top dog? Larry Mavety and Doug Springer’s disgrace of a team is getting a brand spanking new arena. However, it seems like there’s an argument that they might not even be the best team in the city. They’re closer to the worst than the best.

The records of the top teams in Provincial Junior A are always inflated a bit. That league has a bajillion teams means there is more separation between the good teams and the joke teams. (Didn’t Wellington go 47-1-1 not too long ago?) Regardless, it would be really interesting to see if the Vees could beat the Frontenacs. They have some scoring punch with 16-year-old Jordan Mayer who decided not to play for the Soo Greyhounds after being the No. 2 pick in the OHL draft. Both their goalies are among the top 10 in the league and they apparently even let the allow a good coach to coach the team as he sees fit.

University hockey is better than most people give it credit for. The players are older, more mature and more disciplined. This isn’t the first time someone has wondered if a Canadian university team could beat an OHL squad; NHL teams often bring them in to scrimmage their rookies during training camp and they do pretty well. In a one-game, single-elimination setting, RMC would have a shot. Even Queen’s would, considering their ex-OHL goalies, Ryan Gibb (Oshawa) and Brady Morrison (Kingston and Ottawa 67’s), could each steal a win.

 

It has to start somewhere, it has to start some time … a mission statement

Larry Mavety has no more business being in charge of a 2-car funeral than he does running the Kingston Frontenacs (into the ground).

That’s why this site has been started, with the express goal of opening Frontenacs owner Doug Springer’s eyes to the news that people who have Kingston in their blood will not stand for this sorry excuse for an Ontario Hockey League team they’re putting on the ice, especially since the city is building them a brand spanking new arena. In computer geek terms, they’re getting G5 hardware, but the software the Fronteancs are providing is from a Collecovision operating system. In other words, Mavety is about 20 years behind the times.

The Frontenacs are dead last in the OHL’s Eastern Conference with just five points in 13 games. They are a joke on skates. This while playing in a city that has an important place in Canada’s rich hockey history. It’s given the hockey world Don Cherry, the captain of the last Montreal Canadiens Stanley Cup winner (Kirk Muller) and the woman, Jayna Hefford, who scored the gold medal-winning goal for Canada in the 2002 Olympics. To say nothing about the Tragically Hip producing the two of the greatest hockey-themed rock songs, 50 Mission Cap and Lonely End of The Rink. It’s appalling that for all that hockey culture and obvious love of the game in my hometown, that we are stuck with the Frontenacs and their inept management, year after year. (Don’t even get me started on the Count Frontenac crest.)

The firing of Bruce Cassidy on Tuesday was a call to blog. Cassidy is a good coach. He’s been in the NHL, he’s been in the AHL, but the way it looks here is that he was completely undermined by Mavety and Springer. Remember last season, when Bobby Hughes quit the team between periods of a playoff game? It was a total lack of discipline from Hughes, but Mavety and Springer let him back on the team… right then and there, they cut the legs out from under a good coach, and sent the message that Bruce Cassidy, and whoever eventually replaces him, will not be the coach of anything.

Mavety and Springer have not shown any acumen for running a quality, professional operation that is needed to win the OHL today. Someone has to say it. It’s not being said very stronger in the local paper, on the radio station that covers the game nor on any blogs that I could find, so it’s being said here.

Here’s some of the reasons Mavety’s gotta go:

1. This is Mavety’s 11th season and it will be the 10th year in a row that the Frontenacs fail to get past the first round of the playoffs. They haven’t done it since 1998, the first season of Mavety’s second stint in Kingston, when he hadn’t had a chance to purge all the good players Gary Agnew had brought in.
2. People are too used to Kingston having mediocre teams. The Frontenacs have won one championship in 35 seasons — which, tellingly, came in between Larry Mavety’s stints with the team.
3. Top players are refusing to come. First-rounder Ethan Werek refused to report, yet Mavety tried for weeks to portray it like Werek was going to come, even though the player’s dad owns a Tier II Junior A team that his son can play on until he leaves to play U.S. college hockey. Another draft choice who wouldn’t come, Justin Taylor, was traded away for nothing. He is now averaging a point per game for the London Knights this season.
4. The current team — and I promise you that outside of citing stats, I will speak no evil of any individual player, they are just 16- to 20-year-old kids after all – plays like it has no heart, no jam, no D, no goaltending, no power play and no penalty killing. OHL teams are allowed three “overagers” (players who are 20 at the start of the season), yet Mavety has only one on the team, robbing them of experienced leadership.
5. You can see the team’s lack of chemistry written all over the game stats. Their best all-around defenceman, Ben Shutron, is minus-16 after 13 games with no goals and only four points. Another of the 19-year-olds who will be in the pros next year, Cory Emmerton, is scoring at a much slower rate than he did the past two years, plus he’s minus-10. (Two years ago, when Jim Hulton was coach, Emmerton was +37 for the season.) 
6. The way Cassidy was fired reeks of being a ball-less wonder. They fired him when the team was on the road, so Mavety would be out of town and wouldn’t have to face any reporters face-to-face, and they did it on the day of a game against the Sudbury Wolves, who stink almost as bad as the Frontenacs. (Inspired by that show of sack, the Fronts went out and gave up two shorties in a 4-0 loss.)
7.  Attendance is flatlining. When I grew up in Kingston, in good years Fronts averaged about 2,800 fans per game in the Mem Centre and had regular sellouts when teams like Belleville were in town. One season, 1994-95, they played to 99% capacity. It tears me up to read the game summaries on the OHL website and see the team can’t get more than 2,000 out to a game. The new building will bring out a few people in the short run, but what happens after that, when the team doesn’t improve or show signs of contending? You’re going to be able to hear crickets chirping in that place, and the loyal fans are going to start to stay away since no one likes to sit in a two-thirds empty arena. 

The bottom line is that Kingston deserves better and a good starting point will be replacing Larry Mavety, followed by Doug Springer taking a hands-off position to ownership. Owning half of the undeveloped property in Kingston doesn’t turn you into Glen Sather. Get rid of Mavety, hire a qualified coach and GM from this century and you’ll have more fans coming to watch your team. Translation: More money for you! How does that sound? 

It’s not going to happen until Larry Mavety is gone.

Let me know what you think at firemavety@yahoo.ca.

 

There was a time, back in his prime

It just occurred what a double-edged sword dealing with Larry Mavety across the past couple decades has always been for Kingston fans. He beat us with coaching savvy in Belleville and now he’s beating us with apathy and downright nincompoopery as the Frontenacs so-called director of hockey operations. (Doesn’t a team have to have direction to have a director?) 

His best years came in Belleville in the ’80s and again in the mid-’90s after his first time with Kingston. Mavs always had these tight, well-coached Belleville Bulls teams that went hard as fuck and always seemed to get the better of Kingston when it counted, especially in 1995 when they eliminated the Fronts in six games after that team led by David Ling won the franchise’s first (and last) division championship. Then he got old, the fire inside faded, and he decided that Kingston would be a good place for his retirement, only he decided he would first semi-retire by running the Fronts down. 

For pity’s sake, the most attention the Fronts have received in the past 10 years either came in 2001 when Mavs invited Marty McSorley to skate with the team during his ban from the NHL — and actually thought it wouldn’t be a distraction. Or it came last year when Stephen Colbert was doing his bit with the Saginaw Spirit and said, “I don’t know what a Frontenac is, but I think it’s French for ‘bend over and take it.’ “  

 

Mavs’ personal protector

So Frontenacs owner Doug Springer claims in the Whig-Standard that he’s the one who fired coach Bruce Cassidy.

Sorry, not buying it. It sounds like Springer is stepping to the plate to protect the general manager who put together a team with one overage player. It’s like the media have a better chance of getting a quote from Fidel Castro than they do of getting one from Larry Mavety.