There was a time when Winnipeggers were extremely excited to have an NHL team again.

When the Atlanta Thrashers made a fairly hasty retreat from the American South, the optimism was overwhelming. Sure, the Thrashers had been a disastrous franchise, making the playoffs once in 11 seasons, but the perception was that there were so many problems with the team simply because they were located in Georgia. Attendance numbers were dismal, not in any way improved by the fact that the team was as well. And no matter who was in charge, the team was almost always poorly coached and more poorly managed.

But a new team — any new team — for a hockey-mad market that had been abandoned 15 years earlier was something over which to be excited. It didn't matter that the Thrashers were terrible, and carried a roster littered with dead-end players. It only mattered that the Thrashers were an NHL team.

The people that bought the Thrashers and bundled them out of the heat and humidity did what they thought was best to air out the loser stink that had seeped so deeply into the fabric of the franchise, like an old hockey bag you have to leave on the back porch for a week after a long season. They fired basically everyone they could, a lot of the front office staff, the coaches, and so on. They had to keep the players, because that's how it goes. If they'd had their druthers, a lot of those guys probably would have gotten shipped out too.

But the problem with that strategy is now apparent. Rick Dudley wasn't a great general manager. Nor did Craig Ramsay have much success in his only year behind the bench. Their being fired was among the least-surprising things in franchise history, probably tied with the fact that they still haven't won a playoff game.

Blindly gutting as much of the team as possible, though, hasn't worked out either. Kevin Cheveldayoff has proven himself to be woefully out of his depth as the general manager, as he routinely makes baffling personnel decisions that in no way make his team more likely to squeak into the playoffs. Claude Noel lasted two and a half seasons behind the bench before rightfully being canned (a total of 178 points in the standings over 177 games, and never especially near the playoffs). He replaced only recently by NHL retread Paul Maurice, whose success has come mostly in comparison with his predecessor (41 points in 35 games, a 96-point pace).

The excuse for so, so long in Winnipeg, whenever something went badly, was that this was the Thrashers' fault. A little too much Atlanta in the way that they played, as if by simply moving to a Canadian city, the team was supposed to play a little harder, a little smarter, and a lot better. In particular, there was much lamentation of every turnover by Dustin Byfuglien, every muffed pass from Evander Kane (the Most Atlanta Players the Jets had, if you follow the meaning).

Noel loved to talk about his defense's tendency to give up what he called “free pizzas” to the opposition — that is, turnovers which resulted in high-quality scoring chances — as though he were somehow not in charge of how the team played.

And still people came. Canada is head over heels in love with hockey, obviously, and the second the Jets were a team that existed once again — and by the way, the tackiness of calling the team the Jets is off the charts — people were basically throwing all their money at the team. The line to buy season tickets was immediately long, and has remained so to this day. The team store couldn't keep jerseys and hats on the racks. The media fawned over every win, blamed the Atlantaness of it all for every loss, and excused away every curious decision. It takes a lot of hubris for an organization and entire city to believe that just by changing geographical locations, but Canadian hockey has always had hubris by the bucketful.

This enthusiasm — which has made Winnipeg itself a darling of the league — has also led to a lot of its undoing. Because the Jets could do no wrong for most of the last three seasons, not too many eyebrows were raised by all the losing. Now, to be fair, it takes time to dig any franchise out of the gutter (that's more or less where Atlanta was) so the patience was indeed prudent for a time. The blinders, however, were not.

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