Gauthier Pulls the Plug on a Lame-Duck Coach

By DIANE PUCIN

Dec. 15, 2000 12 AM PT

Merry Christmas, Craig Hartsburg. You were fired to relieve tension. It sounds as if Pierre Gauthier had the choice of springing for a team massage or firing the coach.

Choosing from the least-creative page in the manual they issue general managers, Gauthier, the general manager of the Mighty Ducks, canned the coach.

And from the first page of the book on the Disney way to run a team, the Mighty Ducks got the cheap solution. Hartsburg was replaced by a mostly anonymous 51-year-old assistant coach named Guy Charron.

Charron immediately said: “To say we should change a lot of things to generate the offense of our elite players, that’s not necessarily the case.”

To which one might ask, what’s the point then?

Hartsburg has been replaced by a man who, according to Gauthier, is a good friend of his. Charron has spent eight years in the NHL, mostly as an assistant. He coached 16 games at the end of a sorry Calgary Flame season (1992) and finished with a 6-7-3 record.

Charron is getting more than the tail end of this season, but he will have the same fragile team with the same fragile confidence and the same fragile psyches. He says there’s no reason to open the ice for Paul Kariya and Teemu Selanne. He says it is more important to “minimize goals against.”

That’s what Hartsburg has said. So what’s the point?

Attendance is falling at an alarming rate. Wins are coming at a glacial rate. And all we get is Guy Charron?

Gauthier has given no hint that he has any immediate plans to change the Duck personnel. That would be the hard thing, the expensive thing.

“We have a club,” Gauthier says, “that’s, in one way, built around top-end players with a lot of skills and scoring ability. We’ve complemented them with a variety of people, a lot of them young people, just entering their prime years. We’ve played reasonably well but we’ve built up our frustration pretty well. We’re not getting results. We need to relax things here, rebuild our confidence.”

And then Gauthier spoke about relieving tension.

Yep, firing Hartsburg--who Gauthier characterized as decent, honest and hard-working--should be just the ticket to pop that tension bubble. What better way to make young players confident, to get Kariya hitting the net instead of the post, to get Selanne leading the way up the ice than to send Hartsburg away?

Oh, you mean there is a better way?

Like getting better players?

It’s probably too late for that this year. And maybe that is partly Hartsburg’s fault. A coach should be able to make a case for acquiring certain talent because it is the talent upon which a coach’s job depends. Apparently Hartsburg couldn’t do that. It’s hard to believe Charron can either.

Better players should have come over the summer. They didn’t. Gauthier or Disney or both did not see fit to get big names, big talent. They got German Titov, Dan Bylsma, Jim Cummins, Patrick Traverse. None of them has made a difference. Not in a good way.

Hartsburg didn’t complain. He didn’t open the ice for Kariya and Selanne, at least not enough for many of the fans.

But that shouldn’t have been a surprise. Hartsburg had a system. Gauthier knew that and said he liked Hartsburg’s system. Then Hartsburg was never given players who might have made his system work alongside the skills of Kariya and Selanne.

Gauthier said there comes a time when an organization must adjust when things aren’t working.

Things aren’t working with the Ducks, but the “organization” hasn’t done anything.

Replacing Hartsburg with Charron is doing nothing.

It is easy.

Nobody is going to shed tears over Hartsburg. He was not a man to warm up to. He was intense, he was serious. He was stoic and silent. He was loyal. He was hard on himself and hard on his players. Maybe this caused “tension.” But there will be few people at the Arrowhead Pond tonight when the Ducks play the Rangers who will feel badly that Hartsburg isn’t around.

There might be some who won’t even notice.

That’s not the Disney way.

The Disney way is to do the easy thing, especially if the easy thing comes cheaply.

What can we expect to be different tonight when the Ducks play with Charron behind the bench?

“I’d like to say,” Charron said, “that I had a long list of changes. But it’s a pretty short list. I’m not going to change a whole lot of things. Hopefully we’ll have the players feeling good about going out and doing the work they’ve been doing to generate some success. It will be business as usual.”

It was “business as usual” that got Hartsburg fired. Wasn’t it?

“Business as usual” was losing to Dallas, 1-0, on Sunday when the Ducks seemed to play hard, play well and do good things except for one defensive mistake.

“Business as usual” has been hanging around the edges of the playoff race, counting points, counting games, measuring the distance between 11th place, 10th place, ninth place and the magical eighth-place team that goes to the postseason.

So the Ducks have replaced Hartsburg with Charron.

And, if we’re lucky, we will get business as usual. Maybe with less tension.

Are you lining up for tickets yet?

Diane Pucin can be reached at her e-mail address: diane.pucin@latimes.com

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

CRAIG HARTSBURG WITH MIGHTY DUCKS

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Season Record Place 1998-99 35-34-13 *3rd 1999-00 34-36-12-3 5th 2000 11-15-4-3 5th

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*Swept in first round of playoffs

MIGHTY DUCKS COACHES

Ron Wilson (1993-97): 120-145-31