Vigneault replacement Yeo well aware of what’s ahead
PHILADELPHIA » During his introduction Monday as the Flyers’ new head coach, Mike Yeo mostly wore a scowl. Might be indicative of his normal demeanor, but more likely it was a byproduct of what he would term “a very, very emotional day.”
So he was only respecting the process; he’s well aware that if you’re a professional hockey coach at the highest level, you have to accept that no matter the immediate ratio of success, you’re more than likely a short-timer.
Yeo (pronounced Yow, not Yo or YEOW!) is only too familiar with this messy NHL divorce process. At 45, he’s already twice been a head coach in this league, doing especially well in his first appointment in Minnesota under a Wild general manager by the name of Chuck Fletcher.
It was Fletcher who introduced Yeo to the league hiring process in 2011, it was Fletcher who introduced Yeo to the league firing process in Feb. 2016, when the Wild were in the midst of an eightgame losing streak. Sound familiar?
“I’ve been on both sides of it before,” Yeo, 48, said hours before he’d go behind the Flyers bench to somehow try to find a way to end the Flyers’ eight-game losing streak. “I’m not a young pup anymore. I’ve been around the league for a long time, so I’ve seen when times go poorly and why that is and how things can get turned around. What I do know is I like Chuck. I believe in this group, I really do. I believe in where we’re going to get to.”
He wasn’t there to celebrate his new appointment because, Yeo said, he’d been
close with two guys he’d worked with the past twoplus years, ousted head coach Alain Vigneault and topdrawer assistant Michel Therrien. Both had been summarily fired earlier in the day by Flyers GM Fletcher, who at the moment was sitting next to Yeo with a bit of a scowl all his own.
Yet Yeo knows enough that while there are so many head coaches in the league being hired and fired and re-hired and re-fired, you never look at a gift horse of an NHL job with a downturned mouth.
“For me personally, I’ve learned lessons from the past,” Yeo said. “Coaches can learn. Coaches can grow. … For me, in my opinion, my best days are yet to come. This is a very difficult
time. It’s emotional, yet this is an unbelievable opportunity.”This is not a very good story right now, this season. The nice thing is we have the opportunity to change that, so let’s get to work.”
Just a week earlier, Fletcher had been behind a mic explaining to many of these same media minds that despite an ongoing losing streak, there was no reason to suspect Vigneault’s job was in imminent danger. After all, the season had gone pretty well for the first few weeks, sporting an 8-4-2 record after the first 14 games. But then the injuries began to mount, and soon, too, the losses.
Since that previous Monday’s press availability, the Flyers had added two more
humiliations to the losing streak, their 7-1 home loss to the Tampa Bay Lightning Sunday night a final-straw classic.
“Last week I talked about buying time and trying to find out where we are,” Fletcher said Monday. “I just felt watching our team last night that we needed to make a change. We need a way to spark change within our group and in an ideal world we could have bought more time and waited, but I just felt we couldn’t wait anymore.
“I do believe this group can be a better team. But right now it’s everything. I just think our details are lacking right now, obviously our confidence is lacking. Guys, they care, they try. But I just feel Mike can help us get back to
the identity we need to win games.”
Of Alain, who also was a guy Fletcher felt was the right guy in 2019 to get an underachieving team without much of an identity gain all those good things …
“AV’s a good coach,” Fletcher said. “Mike Therrien is a good coach and a good friend. This is not what you’re looking for, but there’s never a good time to do this. We’re all complicit and … I’m the one that’s ultimately responsible.”
Until such time that NHL general managers simply fire themselves rather than have their frustrated and financially pressured hockey executives do it for them, NHL teams are going to continue going through professional head coaches like they go through so many broken stickblades.
Just like head coaches, those pieces of equipment are recycled, too.
“He knows there’s no promises going forward,” Fletcher said about Yeo, “but he has his hands on the wheel now and it’s an opportunity to help this team get going in the right direction. As I said last week, I still don’t know truly what we have here, what our group is. But as we go forward, I think things will become more clear on what we can do.”
No one is expecting a magical turnaround, though with 60 games before them (beginning with one against the Avalanche Monday night), Fletcher and Yeo both said they believed there was time for just that.
Until then, however, Yeo was apparently given this job on an interim basis … even if Fletcher wasn’t calling it that.
With barely any notice, Yeo was going into a game against the Avalanche only with 53-year-old career minor league guy Darryl Williams, who had been hired as a deep assistant coach in July, by his side. Plans call for the hiring of at least one more assistant coach, with no timeline on that.
Just like Yeo doesn’t have much of a timeline on his job.
“The focus right now is not on interviewing people and rushing to hire a head coach,” Fletcher said. “Right now it’s to support Mike and get this team playing the right way and then we’ll make the decisions that we have to make at the right time.”
The right time? That’s the one part of this Flyers unmerry-go-round that never quite seems to come.