Flames clean house on coaching front
Bench boss Gulutzan, assistants Cameron and Jerrard relieved of duties after missing playoffs
CALGARY — The Calgary Flames made their first off-season move on Tuesday afternoon, firing head coach Glen Gulutzan.
General manager Brad Treliving also relieved assistant coaches Dave Cameron and Paul Jerrard of their duties.
It was the team’s first off-season move since the 2017-18 campaign officially ended last Monday when the team completed their final exit meetings at Scotiabank Saddledome.
But the writing had been on the wall for weeks. Change was anticipated.
“We underperformed,” Treliving said. “So when you go through the process of underperforming, you pull everything. It starts with myself and personnel decisions.”
After guiding the Flames to the 2016 playoffs in his first season as bench boss (which ultimately resulted in a four-game sweep at the hands of the Anaheim Ducks), Gulutzan followed it up with a 37-35-10 campaign. The team was officially eliminated from Stanley Cup playoff contention on March 26 with a 3-0 loss at the Los Angeles Kings.
The team’s troubles didn’t start in the final month of the campaign, although the last few weeks of the season went off the rails. The Flames won only two games in their final 11. It was hard to believe it was the same club that was in a playoff position on Feb. 25, when they occupied the final Wild Card spot in the Western Conference.
They finished 20th overall while their home record (17-20-4) was ranked a lowly 28th in the NHL.
“Personality didn’t have a whole lot to do with this decision,” Treliving added. “I don’t think our group is necessarily a difficult group to coach. There are challenges. I think there are challenges with every group. But by no means is today’s decision letting anyone off the hook. You have success when players perform well.
“I felt that in order to get us to this level, we had to make this decision.”
The 46-year-old native of Hudson Bay, Sask., was hired by Treliving on June 17, 2016, following the dismissal of Bob Hartley who had spent four seasons at the helm of the Flames, including the truncated lockout season of 2012-13. Gulutzan has a 146-125-23 record at the NHL level between two season with Calgary (2016-2018) and two seasons at the helm of the Dallas Stars (2011-2013).
He had one year remaining on his contract.
“You can’t keep churning (coaches in and out),” Treliving said. “But, having said that, you can’t not make a decision for the same reason.”
The team lacked resilience when things were difficult. They ran into injury trouble. They struggled with secondary scoring. And while many of those factors are not the direct result of Gulutzan and his coaching, dominoes have to fall after an underachieving campaign like this one.
“Glen is a good coach — a wonderful person,” Treliving said. “We didn’t get our team that I felt we needed to. I felt we underperformed and I felt like we had players underperforming. When you look at certain special teams, they underperformed. So you look back and you say, ‘How do we get it there?’ ”
Jerrard, who had been an assistant coach in the Dallas Stars and Vancouver Canucks systems with Gulutzan before joining the Flames, was responsible for the penalty kill and defencemen. He was partly in charge of the bench management of the blue-line combinations.
Cameron, the former head coach of the Ottawa Senators, ran the powerplay which finished at a lowly 16 per cent which was 29th in the NHL. Outside of their final 7-1 win over the Vegas Golden Knights on April 7 when Mark Jankowski scored one power-play marker, the man advantage scored just once in 18 games, going 1-for-50 in that span.
“Everybody is going to dissect what they want to dissect but when you’re in it, if I look at the two years that I’ve been here … Last year’s team was the epitome of we did a good job of putting a team together,” Gulutzan had said last Monday. “I thought this year, honestly, we had better players. We just never had as consistent a team effort, but we didn’t have as consistent of a lineup. We didn’t, as coaches, bring these guys together enough.”
Treliving accepted the blame, indicating the Flames relied too much on too few.
“There’s no dodging the question … why did the players underperform? In certain cases, do we have to make decisions there?” Treliving said.
Ice Chips:
Treliving indicated that assistant coach Martin Gelinas, video coach Jamie Pringle and goaltending coach Jordan Sigalet will remain with the Flames ... LW Johnny Gaudreau will play for the U.S. team at the world championships.