Firing line

This is ridiculous.

By all accounts, Andy Murray's one of the good guys in the NHL and I won't hide the fact that the following has a tinge of bias because the man is a local and he's always made himself available to myself or other reporters at the Sun when a story was in the works. I interviewed him after he led the Canadian team to the world championship gold medal in 2003.

That said, well before Murray was given the axe by the underachieving, if not overly talented, Los Angeles Kings on Tuesday, I've ranted about idiot organizations that prove time and again why they are regularly forgotten about when the term "success" is brought up.

With all due respect to the adage that coaches are hired to be fired, it's not hard to figure out why certain teams continue to wallow in mediocrity. What's infuriating, from a fan's standpoint, is the seeming obliviousness of the people who run these teams have to what is going on right beneath their noses.

Sometimes, however, it's not inattention but rather indifference. The Chicago Cubs, save for the Year of Bartman, have regularly been bottom-feeders to the extent they've earned a nickname that characterizes them as such. Curses be damned, this is an organization that has never seen any urgency to make a concerted effort to build a contender knowing full well people will still flock to the Friendly Confines regardless of the bums who are put on the field.

But for those teams that do at least purport to be about getting better, the road to success is often littered with idiocy.

Best case scenario? The Buffalo Sabres fire Ted Nolan following the 1996-97 season, a campaign in which all he did was take his God-awful team to the second round of the playoffs and win the Jack Adams Trophy for coach of the year. Peruse the roster of that Sabres team and you'll find what Nolan did with it was nothing short of remarkable. It's a murderers' row of lame ducks: Donald Audette, Brian Holzinger, Dixon Ward and team-leading scorer Derek Plante (!), who blistered to 53 points in 82 games. (And before you suggest the Late 90s-NHL-as-no-offence-league argument, consider the fact that the top nine scorers in the league had at least 90 points).

Anyway, that's off topic.

Bringing us back to Murray, the Kings are nine games above .500, currently sitting in a tenuous playoff position and have 12 games remaining in the regular season. Top scorers Pavol Demitra and Alexander Frolov have been in and out of the lineup all season with injuries (mostly out) and the Kings have a shaky goaltending situation. Re: Ted Nolan, it's a wonder this team has been successful as it has.

The timing of the decision appears, at the outset, to be atrocious at the very least and shortsighted at best. Now the Kings will go through the drama of a coaching change at the most critical point of their season and, even if they do make the playoffs, are likely fodder for a first-round opponent anyway.

You can run off a laundry list of teams that simply don't get it. A grab bag of organizations run by mental midgets who somehow never notice the difference between themselves and the ones that are regularly, consistently among sports elite.

Put the L.A. Kings in that category.

The only question is: Is it because of inattention or indifference?