The Fort Frances Lakers fired head coach Paul MacLean last week as the team headed into its Christmas break. Assistant coach Tyler Miller will now become the interim head coach for the rest of the season.
Lakers president Gary Silander says the board determined McLean was not living up to expectations and seemed to be doing little to adjust. It was decided in a board meeting on Monday, Dec. 11 to relieve him of his duties after the last game before the break. That game didn’t happen due to weather and MacLean was advised of the decision on Wednesday Dec. 14.
“The board expected more than we were getting, would be an easy way to put it,” Silander said.
The board had higher expectations for MacLean who they believed was well qualified for the job.
“We were expecting to be able to play .500 hockey [have an even win/loss record],” Silander said.
The team is sitting in last place with a 5-19-0-0 record, about a 20 per cent win rate.
The board also hoped to see more improvements in practice with MacLean.
“He didn’t change up the practices, they remained the same all the time,” Silander said. “You can’t learn to battle in the corners if you don’t battle in practice. Sometimes the practices were lacking on certain items to help us in games, and we’re here to develop these kids and that just wasn’t happening.”
In an interview before he was fired, MacLean was optimistic about being able to turn the team around in the second half and was planning to continue recruiting for the Lakers in southern Ontario over the break.
That responsibility now falls to interim coach and GM Tyler Miller. Miller joined the team last year as an assistant with then-interim head coach Ron McKinnon. Silander believes that Miller will be an asset to the team going forward.
“Tyler’s recently played the game… he’s been doing a lot of recruiting and learning from Paul,” Silander said. “We’re just hoping to shake things up more than anything and get some help.”
According to MacLean the team has several roster cards still to fill and add players. Cards are what enable players to play for the team under Hockey Northern Ontario. Each team is allotted a certain number of carded players per season.
Rosters will be finalized as of Jan. 10 which is the trade deadline for the SIJHL for the 2022-2023 season. MacLean was hoping to add two or three more players after the break.
“It would be nice to get three, but I’d be happy to have two good, experienced guys before the deadline,” MacLean said. “I think that’ll help a great deal. We’ve got, I think, 15 first-year guys, that’s a lot of first-year guys.”
Having a young roster can make it hard for a team to succeed when the top teams all have more experience and only three of the older players on the team have played together for the Lakers.
The team has experienced some success, stringing together three wins Nov. 22, 25 and 22 with a win over the Dryden GM Ice Dogs and two against the Red Lake Miners. MacLean said over the course of that win streak he felt the team was buying into the defensive strategy.
Part of the reason the team needed to be so good defensively is that they are struggling to score. Top scorer Ryker Watt has nine goals and eight assists for a total of 17 points, while most of the other teams in the league have one or more 10+ goal scorers. MacLean believed the team needed more natural scorers.
“In my opinion we don’t have natural goal scorers,” MacLean said. “Ryker is our leading scorer and he’s a first-year guy. He’s done well and he can score, but we don’t have a lot of natural goal scorers. Every other team in the league has at least one line of experienced guys that are 19 or 20 and that makes a big difference.”
The Lakers last game before the Christmas break in Spooner, Wisconsin against the Lumberjacks was cancelled due to last week’s weather. The Lakers will resume the ‘22-’23 season on Jan. 6 in Sioux Lookout. Their first home game of the second half is Jan. 10 against Kam River at Ice For Kids Arena.
