From worst to first: How the Portland Winterhawks became the enemy of the States

PORTLAND, Ore. — The Portland Winterhawks are the team the rest of the Western Hockey League loves to hate. Success breeds jealousy and envy, and the Winterhawks have been incredibly successful. On Saturday night the defending Western Hockey League champions opened their fourth consecutive league final.

Often referred to as the "Evil Empire" or the "Cheaterhawks," their haters are legion. But less than a decade ago there was little animosity because the rest of the WHL was too busy laughing.

From 2006-2008 they won a total of 28 games. They were dreadful on the ice and disorganized off it. At one point, the team had some 10 employees working on both hockey and the business. Things became so bad that then general manager Ken Hodge, a former owner who had helped bring the team to Portland, and lone scout Matt Bardsley would pay out of their own pockets to scout players at tournaments.

“We would drive to Calgary, do a tournament, drive back home and then three days later get back into the car and drive back to Calgary or wherever we needed to go because at that time it was a little bit cheaper to drive,” said Bardsley, who is now the team's assistant GM. “It was exhausting, but in those long drives I learned a lot from Ken.

“It was tough because you’re thinking, ‘OK, so this is how it is?’ You’re basically paying to work.”

When it came time to draft players, Bardsley said they didn’t even bother talking to players or their parents. Word had already spread about the sad state of the franchise and Bardsley and Hodge didn’t want their decisions influenced by the threat of a player not reporting.

“It was definitely a shoestring budget,” said Winterhawks assistant coach Kyle Gustafson, who joined the team 10 years ago. “Your scouts are the lifeline of your team — and that was Matt and Ken, just the two of them. How are you going to find players in Podunk, Minnesota when you have to pay for your trip to Calgary and stay at the local Motel 6? It’s so different now.”

“At some point it was going to get better,” added Bardsley. “I wanted to be a part of that.”

It got better once Calgary billionaire Bill Gallacher saved the team from potentially folding or moving to another city. His first move, in October of 2008, was to hire former Los Angeles Kings associate coach Mike Johnston – who had recently lost his job – to bring some semblance of order to the chaos in Portland. Hodge, a WHL fixture and one of the league's most successful coaches, was also kept on as a consultant, a role he still fills.

It might sound strange, but the first thing Johnston did as the newly hired coach and general manager of the team was to look at the schooling and health care the players were receiving.

“Not a lot of our college guys were passing and some guys weren’t even going to school,” said Johnston of those early days. “So we made sure everyone was going to school. Then we made sure our medical care – which was important to the Canadians who came down here to play – was partnered with the (NBA's) Trail Blazers.”

The moves were also designed to build better relationships with both the community at-large and with businesses in the area. Most importantly, it was designed to allay the fears of parents hesitant to send their sons off to a foreign place with a poor reputation.

“I looked at it and said, ‘If I was sending my son to Portland, what would I be worried about?’ For me that was schooling and medical care,” said Johnston. “The third one would be billets, so we put one of our billets as a coordinator and made sure we did all the interviews and went around to all the homes and put a coach in charge of that as well.

“You might think that I would talk a lot about hockey as to how we started this, but it wasn't a lot about hockey – it was more about the environment," said the 57-year-old. "I knew if we could get the environment tidied up we had a chance to do things hockey-wise because we had good hockey people, but the environment wasn't good.”

In the early days, Johnston admits he often wondered what he'd gotten himself into trying to turnaround the moribund franchise. It wasn't a quick fix and there were still many losing nights.

“If you look at our record I think we won 19 games,” said Johnston of the 2008-09 season. “The team had won two before we got there, so that left us with 17 wins on the year. There were definite challenges.”

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