Big Shooter and Morty's Excellent Adventure

It is not everyday that a fan with a blog site gets to interview the Head Coach of an NHL team. That is what we did yesterday. If you have gotten here because of Rawhide's link on the AJC, or Ben's link at the Blueland Blog, welcome. Please don't be a stranger. I'd like to echo Rawhide's thoughts that it was very nice meeting the blog community, and I'd like to thank Ben Wright and the Atlanta Thrashers for setting up an interview with John Anderson and the rest of the bloggers.

Morty will have a much more in depth post about this (he started this blog after all), but I wanted to give a few thoughts:

About .5 seconds after meeting John Anderson, you immediately like him. He came off as a very sincere, genuine person who seemed to really want to take the necessary time to answer our questions with the proper thought. He was very positive, and I think is just what the doctor ordered for our team.

Players will have the green light if they see open ice. As he put it, "if you are a forward and you see your defenseman step up in the play, stay back. It is not rocket science." Also he said we are going to be more aggressive on defense. It has been our strategy in the past to let the other team shoot, on purpose (did I mention we finished 28th last year?). So that will be a nice change.

The most important part of the interview (in my opinion anyway!) came after I complimented John on his handle bar mustache he had last year during the playoffs. He said he had one when he played a long time ago. He also said the great Lanny McDonald did not have a mustache originally (I thought he was born with one). After seeing John's, all of a sudden Lanny started growing his! Do we have a cool coach or what!!! For those of you who are not familiar with Lanny, he looks a little something like this...

All in all it was a great day. As I said, Morty will have much more on this a little later.

For The Blueland Chronicle, I'm Big Shooter.