What's Next for Scott Arniel?

I believe the team has quit on Arniel. He’s been exposed to the public now, but the team has been dealing with this since last season. You can see it in the lack of energy and passion among the leaders, and the way this team blows leads. Even Voracek’s tweet standing up for Brassard was revealing. Arniel is in way over his head. For his sake, the team and the fans, terminate him immediately.

How many coaches will we let the team quit on? I don’t think Arniel is the solution, however I like that they are making the players have to work with him. Everybody wanted an up tempo system, when they quit on Hitch. Here it is, and it’s the same attitude.

I like that Howson told Carter he was part of the solution, as we cannot have players dictate where they will play. Jeff you are here for the term of your contract, start playing.

The last guys off the ice each practice….Johan, Moore, Vinnie…where’s Nash, Carter, RJ? Probably at he bank.

Somebody in authority in the CBJ organization has got to realize that it’s time to move on. Frankly, I’d suggest that Mr. Priest fired Howson and Arniel, bring in a GM (Patrick? Does he want it?), and let the GM hire his coach. Do this before the end of January (today would be nice). Then let this new team start moving those players it can/needs to and start rebuilding the on-ice product (as these new management types are fond of calling it) into something people will pay to see. I don’t see any other way to achieve some sort of different results from what we have seen the past three seasons. Since this season is totally trashed, get a new team in place and use the remainder of the season to figure out what you do for next year. But use a different GM/Coach team. The one we have is broken.

I apologize in advance because this is going to be a long, and possibly a well thought out, rant.

Seriously? Scott Arniel still has his job? I don’t think any one of us who’ve read this blog would continue to have our employers retain us if we produced at the same level that Scott Arniel has. Clearly coaches who have come close to the same ineptness as Arniel this season have already been handed their pink slips, as most should have. Our record is the WORST in the league and yet Arniel still has the keys to the car. When he first came in, I really enjoyed who he had sitting up in the press box during games. It sent a message that the players need to and would be held to a higher standard. Someone needs to show him he hasn’t even come close to embodying those said standards himself.

Speaking of sending messages, what does this lack of action send to the rapidly deteriorating fan base we have left and to the others on the fringe? Arniel’s record this past calendar year is cancerous to attendance. The CBJ brass has been very blessed with an extraordinarily patient and committed fan base that comes from such a small market, but cracks are showing. Attendance hasn’t exactly been stellar this year, and one of the main reasons it has been up lately, in my opinion, is largely due to what equates to morbid curiosity. We know we shouldn’t watch that train smash into that car that broke down on the tracks, but we watch anyways. Eventually people will grow tired of that novelty, and attendance rates will be in the league cellar, just like our record.

I know it’s widely believed that Hitch lost the room towards the end of his tenure, but I’ll never understand why. Because Filatov and other punks felt they weren’t being rewarded even after they had “won the game” a time or two for their teams? Last time I checked, Hitch found success everywhere he coached and won that shiny silver trophy people tend to make a big deal out of. Oh yeah, he also got us to our lone playoff appearance on a team that didn’t exactly scream talent. Why the brass ever caved into the players not buying in to a stabilizing force and proven winner’s message is beyond me.

Them not buying into Arniel’s message doesn’t surprise me at all. How can they buy into anything when they don’t know what the hell it is? The first six weeks of the season, our defense looked utterly lost. I understand many were new to the team and had new partners, but many are veteran players simply looked baffled by the game they make a living off of and have for many years. That, to me, seems to be indicative of a coach not communicating and explaining his system well. The fact it took six weeks to reach a level even resembling respectability at our blue line is even more damning. Add in how other rosters with major overhauls found their stride in the first week is just more compelling evidence he’s more than worn out his welcome here.

Another aspect of Arniel’s coaching that has boggled my mind is his constant shuffling of the lines, game-to-game, shift-to-shift. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to it. I could excuse this if it yielded any results, but it clearly has not. It’s like he just throw’s s*** against a wall and hope it sticks. Even when it appears to be sticking, he takes it all off the wall, shuffles it around some more and throws it yet again. How can you expect any chemistry or cohesion to develop when you throw your lines into a blender every other shift and hope something good comes out of it.

His character has been called into question recently as well. I understood the man is frustrated. I’ve had many failures in life, but I’ve never had them witnessed and scrutinized in such a public manner. I know it must be brutal, but when you blow up and then pout because a member of the media who is just doing their job and doing it well, it speaks volumes about you. So you can try to unload on a female member of the press, but at times you’ve looked downright docile when you know damn well the refs made a terrible call? When other coaches protest garbage calls, the refs seem to at least pretend to give them a listen. When Arniel would call them out, they’d swat him away like he was an annoying gnat, like he was a rookie to the game, and Arniel would just capitulate and pout like he did when the press presented him some cold, hard facts. For someone that has been around the game for 25 years or more, he doesn’t seem to command much respect from the refs and now the players under him. If the press is being too hard for you here, try coaching … anywhere else. You’d find the heat in that kitchen isn’t any cooler there.

Another frustrating aspect of all of this is no coach has ever had the blank check to get skilled players like Arniel has. He appeared to have the best team on paper we’ve ever had at the beginning of the season, and what has he done with it? Injuries, not his fault. Veteran regressing is quality of play, probably not all of his fault. Everything else… much of it falls on his shoulders. He is the head coach after all.

Surely the players, GM and team president share much of of the blame as well, but he’s at fault on more than enough to be let go of. Honestly, it should have happened weeks ago. Maybe it’s Howson trying to save his bacon. If that’s all it is, why isn’t Priest or McConnell going, “Scott (Howson), we’ve seen more than enough. It’ past time to let him go. He doesn’t live up to our or our fans’ expectations and standards”? Give someone the interim tag and let the chips fall where they may for this season. Fail for Nail. I don’t care. At least show what few fans you have left that you care and know enough to understand this isn’t acceptable.

I’m all for stability, so long as it couples with success. Nothing Arniel has shown me leads me to believe he is that guy. I hate having a coaching carousal, but this guy is in way over his head. Columbus is one hell of a sports town, and we deserve one hell of a coach and one hell of a team to compliment our fandom and our hard earned money spent, which feels simply wasted watching this perpetual train wreck.