Don Waddell
Don Waddell
Donald Douglas Waddellis the former, and last President of the Atlanta Thrashers and a former professional ice hockey defenseman. He is currently President of Gale Force Sports & Entertainment, parent company of the Carolina Hurricanes of the National Hockey League...
everybody experience favor jump talking
I think sometimes experience can play in your favor also. Unfortunately, not everybody had the jump that he had. If they did, we'd probably be talking about something different now.
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I watched him play four times and he may not be as fast or as effective offensively, but he's still outstanding on defense and he's a great leader. That's why we wanted him to help us compete for a medal.
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Some guys show up when you tell them to, like two hours before a game or a practice, but Chelios will be there three or four hours earlier than that. I wish all players in the NHL had the passion and drive that Chris Chelios has for the game.
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Jim enjoyed a successful career at Michigan State and we look forward to his continued development at the professional level. He has a great deal of potential which will be enhanced as he competes for a spot on our roster.
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We have a lot of good, young players at USA Hockey and a lot of guys coming. We can take the positives out of this game and out of the whole tournament.
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We had a lot of players playing very well. We said all along that we were going to base this team on not so much what was the history of players ... but how guys were actually playing.
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We probably didn't talk about Chris for the first two months and then on one of our (team evaluation) calls in early December, the name was brought up and everyone jumped on board with it. He played himself on this team.
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We have lots of priorities and things to do. Marc had a good year. We have to sit down and analyze all this.
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We did talk about Ryan Miller quite a bit. The other three guys are all starting goalies in the NHL right now.
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We're really pleased to have Peter guiding our Olympic Team. Peter knows what it takes. He played on our 1988 Olympic team and came back as captain of the 1994 Olympic team. He's coached our last two world championship teams. He's passionate about the game and we're confident he'll do an outstanding job as our head coach.
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We're really pleased to have Peter guiding our Olympic Team.
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We have all of the best American scorers here. But it's hard to score here. Look at the low scores. The defense and goaltending is so good here.
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It's easy to sit up there and judge and say, what if we did this or that. What I came away with as being encouraging ... was we had a lot of guys step up and play big in the big games.
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Once he could put his blueprint on the team, I knew they would be successful. Hopefully, we'll catch up to them.