Coaching changes don’t always work
It doesn’t matter who’s behind bench if the team is bad
Can a coaching change turn a team around?
The Buffalo Sabres are hoping it can after becoming the first National Hockey League team to make a change in this abbreviated season.
The Sabres turfed Lindy Ruff, who had been the league’s longest-serving current coach, and replaced him with Ron Rolston, whose professional coaching experience is limited to a season and a half with the American Hockey League’s Rochester Americans.
Ruff, who had some very good years — a Stanley Cup final and three other Eastern Conference finals — and some very bad years — he missed the playoffs six times — over his 16-year tenure, couldn’t survive a 6-10-1 start.
Rolston, who lost to Toronto in his NHL coaching debut Thursday, faces an uphill battle with a team that now sits 14th in the East.
Buffalo is the 10th team to make a coaching change since the start of the 2011-12 season and fresh faces don’t always produce fresh results.
Canadiens fans have seen both sides of the coin. Randy Cunneyworth wasn’t an improvement over Jacques Martin but, then again, team management cut Cunneyworth’s legs out from under him by announcing he need not apply to have the interim tag removed from his title unless he could speak French.
Michel Therrien was hired during the off-season and has taken the Canadiens from last to first in the Eastern Confer- ence. The big success story last season was Darryl Sutter in Los Angeles. Terry Murray had a 15-14-4 record when he was fired. Sutter not only improved on that in the regular season — posting a 25-1311 record — but also guided the Kings to the Stanley Cup. Washington improved after Dale Hunter replaced Bruce Boudreau last season. Anaheim had a better record after Boudreau replaced Randy Carlyle, but Carlyle couldn’t give the Toronto Maple Leafs their first playoff berth in seven years after replacing Ron Wilson.
The coaching changes seem to have had an effect this season in Toronto and Anaheim, with the Maple Leafs and Ducks both in playoff positions. But Hunter went back to the comfort of junior hockey and rookie head coach Adam Oates is now presiding over a train wreck in Washington. Former Canadien Kirk Muller has the Carolina Hurricanes holding a tenuous playoff position in the weak Southeast Division after improving on Paul Maurice’s record last season, but Todd Richards in Columbus, Ralph Krueger in Edmonton and Bob Hartley in Calgary are proof that it doesn’t matter who the coach is if you have a bad team.
Krueger, who has spent his entire coaching career in Europe, might be the most vulnerable of this trio because the Oilers have benefitted from a series of high draft choices but haven’t seen the results that should follow the years of frustration.
There are any number of reasons why a team fails to win — from bad goaltending to injuries to players whose production doesn’t match up with their paycheques.
The one constant is that it’s the coach who will usually pay the price for that failure.