Coaches bank on savings plan
No bench boss safe when goaltending goes off the rails
The hockey world listened with interest on Wednesday as Marc Bergevin, the general manager of the Montreal Canadiens, stood at a podium and explained his decision to fire his friend Michel Therrien as the team’s head coach. “We were not the same team as we were earlier on,” Bergevin told a news conference a day after dismissing Therrien and replacing him with Claude Julien. “There was something missing.”
You could argue that “something” was a combination of things, among them the toll of various injuries. But there’s been one inarguable “something” missing in Montreal of late — specifically the allworld goaltending usually provided by Carey Price. As of Therrien’s firing, Montreal’s most important player and Team Canada’s No. 1 was on pace to make February his worst calendar month since 2013 as measured by save percentage. Just as the Canadiens plummeted in the standings when Price missed four-plus months to injury a season ago, so have the Canadiens been in freefall with Price mysteriously struggling this season
That Therrien would be thrown over the side with Price going sideways — well, you know the old NHL saying: “Goaltending woes mean the coach must go.”
Actually, that’s not an old NHL saying. But consider it an updated version of the ancient saw, “Show me a good coach and I’ll show you a good goaltender.” And lately it’s been ringing truer than ever.
It’s probably not a coincidence that when Julien was fired by the Boston Bruins last week, ending the longest tenure in the league, his exit overlapped with a rare moment in recent Bruins history. For the first eight of Julien’s 10 seasons with the Bruins, the team’s save percentage was never worse than seventh-best in the league. Four times it ranked No. 1. Three times Boston boasted the Vezina Trophy winner as the league’s top netminder in Tim Thomas (twice) and Tuukka Rask. And yet Julien was only fired this year, with Boston’s goaltenders combining for one of the league’s bottom-10 save percentages.
There’s little doubt Ken Hitchcock, dismissed by the St. Louis Blues a couple of weeks back, was also a victim of a puck-stopping stoppage. It’s not like Hitchcock, known for grinding his skat- ers into dust, was any easier on his lineup in previous seasons. But last season the Blues happened to have the NHL’s best save percentage, and he had a job. This year the Blues ranked third-worst, and on Feb. 1 Hitchcock was fired.
“A lot of times you are as good as your goaltending,” is how Dave Cameron, then the coach of the Ottawa Senators, once explained it.
It’s an NHL truism that head coaches don’t often say out loud. And perhaps in part on account of such vocation-exposing statements, Cameron, who spoke it in 2014, is no longer a member of the NHL coaching fraternity. (Cameron was fired by the Senators in April, when team owner Eugene Melnyk pointed to the way Cameron deployed his goaltenders while explaining the reasoning for the axing.)
It’s not the first nor last time a coach’s fate has been tied to the impossible-to-predict ups and downs of NHL goaltending.
Not that Julien should be complaining. Some coaches seem to have better luck than others in this regard. And according to numbers compiled by the Star’s Andrew Bailey, the netminders who’ve played for Julien-coached teams have combined for a .920 save percentage (through Feb. 2). No active NHL coach has been gifted with as much puck-stopping brilliance as Julien — although it should be noted that he has seen at least one season go awry even with the benefit of superior work in the crease.
Back in 2007, Julien was fired by New Jersey Devils general manager Lou Lamoriello with a week left in the regular season and eventual Vezina winner Martin Brodeur in net.
So goaltending, clearly, can never be the only factor in any given situation. It’s understood, too, that save percentage isn’t the be-all, end-all stat to evaluate goaltenders. And it’s also important to point out that the relationship between goaltenders and coaches goes both ways.
Julien, for one, ought to be given credit for his gifted devotion to teaching a structured system that had the Bruins ranked No. 1 in puck possession as measured by Corsi percentage at the time of his firing.
And while Paul Maurice has undoubtedly had bad luck with goaltenders — he’s watched in presumed horror from the bench as a succession of alleged professionals have combined for a .906 save percentage during his career — there are those who’d suggest he’s also a victim of his team’s chronic shortcomings in the defensive zone. (To which Maurice’s supporters might beg to retort: But the year he was fired in Toronto he had to start Vesa Toskala 64 times.)
Maple Leafs coach Mike Babcock, mind you, has risen to the top of his profession without the benefit of otherworldly work in his crease, at least when you consider that the .911 combined save percentage of his teams’ goaltenders sits a little below the .912 average for his peer group. Still, like more than a few coaches, Babcock owes his crucial earlycareer playoff success to a particular goaltender.
Babcock, remember, made his NHL name with the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim. In Babcock’s first season they were first-round underdogs to a Detroit team projected by many to win the Stanley Cup. These were the Red Wings before the salary cap, stacked with a roster that included eight players who’ve since been inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame, among them Maple Leafs president Brendan Shanahan. Babcock’s team, by comparison, had one hall of famer, a 40-year-old Adam Oates. But it also featured J-S Giguere, whose incredible performance in that post-season — wherein he reeled off five shutouts and a .945 save percentage as the Mighty Ducks swept the Red Wings en route to the Stanley Cup final — made him the fifth player to win the Conn Smythe Trophy as playoff MVP in a losing effort.
Babcock, it can be argued, earned the biggest benefit of Giguere’s great run. When the Red Wings were searching for a coach a season later — this after the arrival of Anaheim GM Brian Burke coincided with the franchise’s decision not to bring back Babcock — Detroit hired the guy who’d been at the opposing helm during that memorable 2003 upset.
Maybe it’s no surprise, then, that Babcock was among the people of influence in the Maple Leafs hierarchy who pushed hard for the off-season acquisition of playoffproven goaltender Frederik Andersen from the Ducks. To spin it further: Show me a good goaltender and I’ll show you a happier coach.