Open season on NHL coaches continues
Gallant becomes seventh bench boss fired this season
The particularly unfortunate thing for Gerard Gallant is that Ottawa can be a tough place to get a cab.
Gallant, who was infamously ditched as head coach by the Florida Panthers while on a road trip in North Carolina in 2016, and left to call his own cab to the airport, was relieved of his coaching duties by the Vegas Golden Knights on Wednesday morning.
Vegas had dropped its fourth straight to Buffalo a night earlier. The team continues its road trip in Ottawa, where general manager Kelly Mccrimmon announced that he had whacked his coach.
The last three-plus years of Gallant’s career are all the evidence you need that to be a head coach in the National Hockey League is to submit yourself to a lot of unpleasantness.
Gallant coached the Panthers to the top of their division in 2015-16, but a mediocre start the following year led to that awkward jaunt to the Raleigh airport after just 22 games. His replacement, Tom Rowe, finished the season with a worse record — turns out it wasn’t merely a coaching problem! — and was also replaced. (His replacement has also since been replaced.)
Gallant’s unemployment didn’t last long, as he was hired as the first coach of the expansion Knights. It’s generally a thankless job to helm a first-year club, a lot of nights where your collection of castoffs and dreamers gets its collective head caved in by teams of players who are not plucked from the league’s detritus.
But Vegas was impossibly, historically good in its first season, winning the Pacific Division easily and making it all the way to the Stanley Cup final. That just doesn’t happen.
It’s true the NHL changed the expansion draft rules to give the Golden Knights a better crop of players from which to choose, but it’s also true that no one expected the team to play like an actual contender. It still seems nutty.
Gallant would win the Jack Adams Trophy as the NHL’S coach of the year.
It’s an award that, it turns out, does not provide the winner much of a grace period. The Knights made the playoffs again last season and took a 3-1 lead in their first-round series against San Jose before the Sharks roared back to force a Game 7 with a double-overtime win in Game 6. In the series finale, Vegas was up 3-0 late, but eventually fell in overtime. San Jose managed four goals in four minutes on a power play in the third. In other words, it took some extremely bad luck for Gallant and the Knights to get bounced in the first round.
Things were going fine this season, with Vegas leading the Pacific Division less than two weeks ago — thus earning Gallant the right to coach in the upcoming all-star game — before the team hit the skids. Four losses in a seven-day stretch, and Gallant was out and replaced, in a cruel irony, by Peter Deboer, who was the opposing coach in that Sharks-knights series last spring and was since canned by San Jose. The two even bickered back and forth, with Gallant calling the man who now has his job a “clown.”
The Golden Knights under Gallant have always been good at generating more shots than the opposition, and none of that changed over the past week. What did change was that the Vegas goaltending has been particularly dismal over the past week. Over those four losses, the duo of Marc-andre Fleury and Malcolm Subban stopped 71 of 84 shots, for a collective save percentage of .825, which will get a lot of coaches fired.
Gallant, though, can take solace in the fact that he’s the seventh NHL head coach to become unemployed already this season. Given the way this tends to work, he just needs to wait for some other team to hit a bad skid before someone comes looking for him. Two of the seven, including Deboer, have already been rehired this year.
Failing that, there’s an expansion team coming to Seattle. Gallant would be a good choice for that gig, but I would still advise him to rent, rather than buy.