Thrashers.Today.Com

By Bud L. Ellis
thrashers.today.com

ATLANTA — Two games in Canada this week, two ugly losses for the Atlanta Thrashers.

No need to even go through the gory details of a wasted two days north of the border for a team that occupies the very bottom of the NHL with 19 points.

(Want some perspective? The San Jose Sharks have two more WINS than the Thrashers have points. Yikes!)

Down 3-0 at Montreal on Tuesday, the Thrashers scored three goals in 59 seconds, two by Ron Hainsey and one by Chris Thorburn. They still lost.

Wednesday, the Thrashers were outhustled, outmuscled and outclassed by an Ottawa team that’s 12th in the Eastern Conference, losing 4-1.

So now what? What does this team do?

It clearly is a team that’s listing at the moment, threatening to turn completely on its side and slip beneath the water’s surface. And to think, it’s not even Christmas yet. Could this season be over before we even flip the odometer over to 2009?

Yes. It could very well happen. The Thrashers, for whatever reason, have gotten away from the good hockey they played during their five-game winning streak in November. Atlanta is 1-6-1 since running off those five in a row, and the way they’ve played during that stretch is — to be frank — inexcusable from any so-called professional sports team.

There has been very little spark, very little jump, very little hustle. The Thrashers are getting outworked on every spot of the ice. They aren’t converting on the power play. They are committing dumb penalties. They are getting nothing offensively from Ilya Kovalchuk, one of the game’s most dynamic scorers who is mired so deeply in a scoring slump, he skated with Atlanta’s checking line Tuesday night in Montreal.

That’s how bad it’s gotten for a team that many of us thought wouldn’t be great, but would be a hell of a lot better than this.

I don’t know what the answers are, but the Thrashers better uncover them soon. Granted, they are only seven points from the final playoff spot, and they are 12 points behind Southeast Division leader Washington. But with 13 games left in December, this team’s season has boiled down to this sobering thought:

Unless the Thrashers start winning, and soon, this season is over.

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