Rising coaching costs illustrate pressure on new hire Vigneault
VOORHEES, N.J. >> It was a Monday afternoon in early April, Flyers general manager Chuck Fletcher was a couple of hours removed from telling the media he was going to take his time finding a new head coach. Of course, he’d already had two or three in mind, and one was suddenly unavailable.
A couple of phone calls later, the plan was set. Within days, Fletcher would be flying to Florida to visit with Alain Vigneault. After a couple of meal meetings, all that remained was for it to be formalized.
Vigneault, a veteran NHL coach who had been out of the league for a year but was preparing to coach Team Canada in the IIHF World Championships, seemed sold on the Flyers. Fletcher was certainly sold on him.
Interim head coach Scott Gordon was not going to stay on in that position. A search team for an outside head coach would not have to be formed. There might have been one other serious candidate, but Fletcher wasn’t going to scale that hurdle unless he had to.
Since the preferred Joel Quenneville had just been hired by Florida, Vigneault seemed to fit the bill right away. He’d had a lot of success in three NHL stops, won two President’s Trophies, went to the Cup finals twice, one each during relatively long tenures with the Canucks and Rangers.
Sure, Quenneville has those three glittering Stanley Cup rings, but Vigneault has a hunger for one that perhaps Q couldn’t match now.
That helped Fletcher place Vigneault “right at the top” of his coaching wish list.
“That list I made when I got here, you look at guys that are available and there’s very few guys that have that type of track record, that type of experience and frankly that type of ability to connect with people,” Fletcher said of Vigneault, the somewhat reserved, but dry-witted 57-yearold guy who took both the Rangers and the Vancouver Canucks to the Stanley Cup finals. “There are some other great coaches in this league, but I would put him right up there with anybody.”
Fletcher, of course, was only playing his management hand when he publicly proclaimed there’d need to be time to get a Mr. Right. Besides, there was no guarantee that “AV” was ready to settle down here.
Dismissed in New York a year earlier, he was vacationing under a two-year contract extension signed in late Jan. 2017 that would carry his original fiveyear
New Flyers head coach Alain Vigneault, left, and general manager Chuck Fletcher enjoy a moment during a press conference Thursday at the Skate Zone in Voorhees, N.J.
deal until the end of the 2019-2020 season. As it turns out, it was money well wasted by the Rangers, who after missing the playoffs in 2018 for the first time in Vigneault’s tenure decided he wasn’t the right guy to coach their team anymore, contract extension or not.
You know, because that’s what NHL money people do.
It is a league that has traditionally burned through head coaches on a whim, hence the Rangers doubling Vigneault’s salary (he originally signed a five-year, $10 million deal in 2013, and the two-year extension was worth $4 million per season) only to can him a little more than 15 months later.
Vigneault, a Quebec City native and divorced father of two, said he realized by the end of the summer of 2018 that he wasn’t going to jump to another team right away, so he retired to his summer home in Gatineau, Ont., and tried to relax.
“I was home for Christmas and New Year’s for the first time in 15 years,” he mused. “My parents are 85 and 86, and they were excited about that. But come April (this year), there was no doubt I wanted to get back to coaching. I love to coach. I had a couple of teams that asked permission from the Rangers to talk to me.”
One was the Flyers, and two meetings with Fletcher in Florida was all it took for Vigneault, who signed a reported fiveyear, $25 million deal Monday ... or one week after Fletcher’s lengthy coaching search promise.
“It’s hard to get these guys,” Fletcher said. “There’s successful coaches coming from every area of hockey. Some come out of college, some come out of the minor leagues, some come out of junior. But when you look at some of these proven, high-end guys you have a pretty good idea of what you’re going to get, I guess. There’s not a lot of guessing. They have a proven track record of what they’ve done well and the areas you can work with them on. I just think it’s such a great commodity to get. For our franchise right now I think it’s a very important hire and I think it’s a very good hire.”
Yet it comes at a cost much greater than it would even a few years ago.
Vigneault was one of those young wiz coaches coming out of the junior ranks when first hired to oversee the Montreal Canadiens in 1997. He’d last the requisite three full seasons and was fired early in the fourth, which was right about spot on for the shelf life of head coaches back then. Even now, that average tenure for an NHL head coach hasn’t changed a whole lot, but it is beginning to lengthen because of people like Vigneault and the man the Flyers likely would have hired ahead of him if they could have, the Mighty Q.
Quenneville was announced as the new coach of the Panthers on the morning of April 8, the day Fletcher was meeting with the media for his seasonending promise fest. Quenneville signed a five-year deal reportedly worth just more than $30 million, depending on bonuses reached. That would bring him in at No. 2 next to Toronto’s Mike Babcock, who went with the highest bidder back in 2015, signing what was then an unheard of eight-year deal at $50 million (about a $6.25M average).
That’s still rather unheard of for a hockey coach, but not for long.
The days of a Ken Hitchcock or a Bill Barber representing themselves in coaching contract talks are long gone. At least around here, so is the innovation of hiring a (cheaper) leftfield choice out of a college like North Dakota.
As it turned out, when GM Ron Hextall brought in ND coach Dave Hakstol, they likely didn’t foresee their plan only lasting four seasons. Hextall certainly didn’t see himself looking for work by 2019.