CAGGIULA FINALLY BACK IN ACTION
NHL coaching carousel has youngest coach in league already looking middle-aged
Jeremy Colliton, usually a reliable if stoic question-answerer, could only laugh when asked Thursday about his rapidly accelerating seniority compared to the rest of the NHL’s head coaches.
“I don’t really have a feeling on that,” he said, blushing slightly.
Still a few days away from his 35th birthday Monday, Colliton remains the youngest head coach in the league. And he has spent this season completely focused on preserving his job and trying to turn around the sputtering Blackhawks.
He has had just two partial seasons to implement his strategies, so compared to everlasting predecessor Joel Quenneville — who will return to the United Center with the surging Panthers in less than two weeks — Thursday might as well have been his first day on the job.
Certainly to the Hawks’ fan base, which never fails to grace Colliton with a scattered shower of boos, he remains a newbie. General manager Stan Bowman is naturally more positive in his appraisals of him but still talks about Colliton as though he were a new coach.
“He’s certainly settled into his role right now,” Bowman said Tuesday. “Now that he’s been through over a year and he knows the league better, that’s one thing that has helped him understand the different coaches you’re going against. You can study it from afar, but until you’re coaching against someone, you don’t really know their tendencies and adjustments in-game.”
But this is the NHL, where the coaching carousel always turns quickly outside of a select few cities.
Six coaches have already been fired this season: three for poor performance (New Jersey’s John Hynes, San Jose’s Pete DeBoer and Nashville’s Peter Laviolette), two for off-ice misconduct (Calgary’s Bill Peters and Dallas’s Jim Montgomery) and one essentially for both (Toronto’s Mike Babcock).
This comes after offseason coaching changes in Florida, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Buffalo, Ottawa, Edmonton and Anaheim — all perhaps inspired by St. Louis’ late December coaching change last season that sparked their fairytale Stanley Cup run.
All told, 14 franchises have changed coaches since the Hawks promoted Colliton on Nov. 6, 2018, making Colliton somehow now middle-aged in terms of longevity with his team.
Yet, he has no time to pay attention to that.
“I don’t think you think about it, as far as how long I’ve been in the job compared to other teams around the league,” he said. “Just focused on your own group.”
The only time it crosses his mind is in situations like the game Thursday against the Predators, playing just their second game since firing Laviolette and hiring Hynes (who was just a few months removed from his ouster in New Jersey).
That complicated the Hawks’ pre-scouting, Colliton said, forcing them to rely on videos of the early-season Devils and Colliton’s memories of playing against Hynes-coached Wilkes Barre-Scranton teams in the AHL five-plus years ago.
Colliton isn’t exactly pondering the tumultuous nature of his job during the midseason grind.
From afar, though, it’s worth noting how quickly he has climbed the ranks and how that might give the Hawks an advantage over an increasingly sizable number of their rivals.
Colliton has coached 112 NHL games. Six of his peers have yet to coach 300 with their current team, while 13 have coached fewer than 50.
Suddenly, the league’s youngest coach is no longer anything close to its most inexperienced.