Thrashers make it official, hire Craig Ramsay as head coach

After some speculation about it late last night, the Atlanta Thrashers made it official this afternoon hiring former Bruins assistant coach Craig Ramsay to be the new head coach of the team. Ramsay takes the reigns over from John Anderson who was fired at the end of last season. As for what Ramsay wants to do with the Thrashers, he had some words about that at today’s introduction.

Ramsay’s philosophy is “Forecheck First” Always attack, involve the D, get D scoring. Wants to be as uptempo as possible.

That’s an interesting philosophy to want to adapt for a team that, at the moment, is lacking any real scoring punch or dynamic forwards and just added a not-exactly-fast Dustin Byfuglien to the lineup. If he’s preaching a team attack philosophy, however, an army of relative unknowns working together can be as overwhelming as anything. That said, it’d still be nice for the Thrashers to add some pieces to that puzzle. They’ll be able to do that if they wish as the Thrashers are swimming in cap space.

General manager Rick Dudley will certainly have his work cut out for him to get the Thrashers in a place where they can make the playoffs, but with $26 million of cap space, a lot of things can happen, it just needs to be done smartly. Getting some assistance for Evander Kane, Zach Bogosian, Niclas Bergfors, Nikolai Antropov and Byfuglien to make sure those three guys aren’t your first scoring line would be awfully nice. That is unless the Thrashers want to be picking first at the draft in 2011.