RECYCLED COACHES NOW A TOUGH SELL
It’s a bad time to be out of work in the NHL because GMS won’t grant second chances
One by one, they’re falling.
Coaches. Assistant coaches. Equipment managers.
Three months into the season, five coaches have already lost their jobs. The reasons range from racism to physical, verbal and emotional abuse, to that vague catch-all of “inappropriate behaviour.”
In some cases, it’s all of the above. In others, it’s hockey-related — though good luck differentiating between the two.
These are muddy times that the NHL is wading through.
The other day, Brendan Shanahan was talking about the difficulty in judging coaches who have seemingly evolved from what they once were 10 or 20 years ago, when a reporter asked the Toronto Maple Leafs’ president what he would say if a rival general manager asked about hiring Mike Babcock.
It was a straightforward question. But it was also a tricky question.
Technically, Babcock was fired from the Leafs last month because of performance issues. That’s another way of saying the team stunk. But since then, his exit has become more complicated, with former players describing him as a bully and a tyrant who went out of his way to make their lives miserable.
Could Shanahan recommend a two-time Olympic gold medal-winning coach who led the Leafs to three playoff appearances in four short years to another team? Would he even be allowed to?
“I think that’s a hypothetical I don’t want to get into,” he said, before going on a tangent where he criticized Babcock’s past coaching tactics.
“You have to be able to evolve with the times. You have to be able to reflect and in some cases apologize for past behaviours. But I think that the focus for most of us right now is how to be better moving forward.”
In other words, don’t expect Shanahan to give Babcock a letter of recommendation. Not that anyone is probably asking for one.
The same goes for Bill Peters and Jim Montgomery, who both lost their jobs in the past several weeks because of varying degrees of inappropriate conduct. And while Peter Deboer and John Hynes were recently canned for “performance reasons” (i.e.: their teams weren’t playing well), there’s still a cloud of uncertainty hanging over every out-of-work coach these days.
As commissioner Gary Bettman said earlier this week when outlining his four-point plan in making the NHL a more inclusive workplace, “due diligence will get to levels we haven’t seen before.”
Bettman then added, “That’s a good thing.” But it can also be a bad thing for coaches such as Deboer and Hynes, who seemingly did nothing inappropriate except lose the occasional game, but now must submit to a polygraph test before they’re even considered for an interview.
The old line about Babcock used to be that the day a team fired him would be the day that another team would hire him. That’s basically what happened to Claude Julien, who was hired by the Montreal Canadiens seven days after losing his job with the Boston Bruins. Joel Quenneville and Todd Mclellan were each out of work for five months before jumping behind the benches of new teams.
That’s what teams have done: recycle coaches over and over. But not anymore.
Now, it’s easier to toss them into the garbage.
No GM would be foolish enough to give an opportunity to Peters, who resigned from the Calgary Flames last month over past allegations that he had uttered racial epithets and physically assaulted players while coaching in the minors and with the Carolina Hurricanes. The same goes for Montgomery, who was fired earlier this week for “unprofessional conduct.”
Even a coach with Babcock’s impressive resume may have coached his last game in the
NHL, following Chris Chelios’ and Johan Franzen’s claims that he was verbally and emotionally abusive while with the Red Wings, as well as an incident with Toronto’s Mitch Marner that Shanahan said was not “appropriate or acceptable to us.”
As for Deboer and Hynes, there’s a fear they’re the victims of bad timing.
This is the worst time to be a hockey coach. But it’s an even worse time to be out of a job. If you’re not already working within an organization, then good luck getting a GM to stick his neck out and hire you.
If it happens, it will be after months and months of vetting.
No one wants to make a mistake like the one that Flames GM Brad Treliving made when he hired Peters. Treliving has claimed that he had done due diligence before hiring Peters. But apparently, he hadn’t spoken to enough people — or the right people.
So where does that leave Hynes and Deboer?
Both lost their jobs due to hockey-related reasons. In other words, their only crimes (so far) were not getting the power play or the penalty kill to click. But with stories of abuse popping up almost daily — and featuring coaches who are catching the hockey world by surprise — you can fully expect that general managers will exercise caution before digging into the recycling bin.
Maybe that’s why every team that was looking for a replacement coach has so far hired in house. After all, they’ve already been vetted.
You have to be able to evolve with the times. You have to be able to reflect and in some cases apologize for past behaviours.