Bar keeps rising for superstar coaches
With cap, bench bosses are one place teams can spend more money to gain an advantage
Some five years ago, which must seem like 55 years to the faithful, the Vancouver Canucks sat down to extend the contract of thenhead coach Alain Vigneault.
The Canucks, at the time, were coming off their second straight Presidents’ Trophy and had made the Stanley Cup Final the year before. Throw in an Adams Trophy from his first year in Vancouver and Vigneault was in a position to seek top dollar for his profession, which sat in the $2 million per season range. Now, hit the fast-forward button. This week, the Montreal Canadiens signed Claude Julien to a new deal. Julien’s resume, to be sure, places him near the top of his profession. But he’d also just been fired by the Boston Bruins, a development, as it turned out, that didn’t exactly hurt his bargaining position.
His deal with the Habs is for five years and $25 million making Julien, for the moment, the third-highest paid coach in the National Hockey League.
“With his track record, he’s a superstar,” Canadiens GM Marc Bergevin said.
And, finally, the best coaches are getting paid like superstars.
Julien’s contract is the latest sign that NHL coaches are staring at a new landscape which started two years ago with Mike Babcock’s groundbreaking deal and is leading to some exciting new places.
In the space of five years, the upper reaches of the coaches’ market have more than tripled with Babcock leading the way at $6.5 million, followed by Chicago’s Joel Quenneville, whose three-year extension at $6 million kicks in next season.
There’s another layer of half a dozen coaches making at least $3 million per including, ta da, Vigneault, who’s signed a three-year extension through 2019-20 worth $4 million per. Washington’s Barry Trotz is also poised to join that group.
The concept of the superstar coach isn’t new and the right man in the right place has been able to name his price in other sports. The Spurs’ Gregg Popovich leads the NBA at $11 million, followed by the Clippers’ Doc Rivers at $10 million.
In football, Seattle’s Pete Carroll and New Orleans’ Sean Payton sit around $8 million. Bill Belichick, meanwhile, makes $7.5 million per which is a tad misleading because: a.) the details of his contract with the Patriots aren’t exactly public knowledge; and b.) if he ever went to market he’d become the NFL’s highest-paid coach in a heartbeat.
MLB managers, for their part, are somewhat underpaid with Joe Maddon, Bruce Bochy and Mike Scioscia topping the list at $5 million. As for international soccer, let’s just say the salaries of the top managers dwarf their North American counterparts.
Hockey coaches, meanwhile, existed in their own underpaid bubble before Babcock came along but there are other forces that have inflated coaches’ salaries. Ironically, the salary cap and the parity it brought had a huge impact on the coaching profession.
With teams spending at or near the same levels, the one area where a franchise could gain a competitive advantage is through a star coach. That, in turn, drove up the price for the top men in the business and virtually every other NHL coach went along for the ride.
There’s also been enough cases of a new coach delivering the desired results to sustain this trend. Bruce Boudreau has turned the Minnesota Wild into a marquee team. Babcock has made an impact in Toronto. Last year Pittsburgh turned their team over to Mike Sullivan in mid-season and won a Stanley Cup.
This year, there have already been five in-season changes. Doug Weight with the Islanders and Mike Yeo in St. Louis have enjoyed some early success. Julien’s signing is also a clear signal the Habs were going all in this season.
Now, there’s no such thing as a free lunch and that spike in salaries has created a heightened sense of pressure in a profession that already carries an unhealthy level of stress. As mentioned, there have been five changes since the start of the season and four more made last summer.
Throw in two in-season changes in 2015-16 and more than one-third of the NHL’s 30 teams have changed coaches in the last year-plus.
Quenneville, who’s in his ninth season with the Hawks, is now the senior-most NHL coach, followed by Arizona’s Dave Tippett and the Kings’ Darryl Sutter who’s put in 5½ seasons in Los Angeles.
Willie Desjardins, who was hired in June of 2014 by the Canucks, sits, wait for it, 11th on the seniority list and three of the coaches ahead of him — Bill Peters, Peter Laviolette and Trotz — were hired that same off-season.
So, for coaches, this is the new reality. Teams are limited by the salary cap. The cap also severely inhibits trades. If you’re looking to shake up your team, that just leaves one position, the guy standing behind the bench.
That’s made him a lot richer. It’s also made him a lot more nervous.