The axe fell in Chicago primarily because GM Kyle Davidson thought so highly of the job he and his staff had done assembling the talent that was handed to Richardson in September.
“You have to be realistic with what your expectations are and what you can demand out of a group,” Davidson told Chicago media after Richardson’s firing was announced. “But having said that, I don’t believe this is a last-place group. And so that’s where we find ourselves.”
When a GM’s greater expectations clash with a lesser reality, the head coach often finds himself out of work. The team’s troubles might be his fault — they are always his problem, as borne out by the math.
Currently, the average tenure for all 32 head coaches is slightly under three years, with only Tampa’s Jon Cooper (in his 13th season), Pittsburgh’s Mike Sullivan (10th), Colorado’s Jared Bednar (ninth), Carolina’s Rod Brind’Amour (seventh) and Montreal’s Martin St. Louis (fourth) well ahead of that curve.
Twenty-one head coaches are in either the first or second year with their current teams.
The league’s full history paints a slightly more optimistic picture of the profession. Current and defunct franchises have combined for 1,755 years of existence and, as mentioned, the league’s official coaching registry lists 397 names. That means the historical average tenure of a head coach with any one franchise is 4.42 seasons.
Over the full course of NHL history then, a head coach works for an average of 1.69 teams in a career that lasts 7.47 years.
The NHL registry of general managers, on the other hand, shows 221 names. So, on average, a GM lasts about 7.9 years with each franchise, almost twice as long as a head coach.
Most GMs get hired once — 149 of them — with 52 others having been hired twice, 11 with three stops, seven with four and two with five. And it should be noted that eight GMs did more than one tour of duty with the same club. On average, a GM gets hired 1.47 times. That makes the average career 11.6 years long.
That seems to check out, since most GMs are allowed to fire at least one head coach before the finger starts to point at them.
Richardson was Davidson’s first major hire and the former stay-at-home defenceman stayed at home in Chicago for two full and often frustrating seasons, during a massive sell-off and rebuild. He then got just 26 more games worth of rope in the final year of a three-year deal before the dreaded combo of spiking expectations and falling point total failed Davidson’s smell test.
An early to mid-season firing can elicit the best from players who genuinely struggled under the previous coach’s methods and preferences. It can also shock or shame an entire roster into action, at least short-term, known as the The Bump.
Over time, the sacrificing of a head coach has become the tried-and-true move that shifts focus away from the man at the top of the organization’s hockey operations food chain, as long-time head coach Tom Renney observed so astutely in 2011 during an interview with the Associated Press.
“GMs are in a bind, too,” he said. “They don’t often want to admit a mistake in drafting, signing, acquiring the underachieving or misfit player, as it is clearly a reflection on them, as it is in hiring the coach who may not be able to get the wins. Players are acquired, coaches are hired and GMs inspired by what they truly believe is the right person and having a loyalty to the philosophical line of their head coach by securing him to a strong term with compensation to match. Over time, unless the team replaces three players per year — a random number — the change will most often come from behind the bench.”
While that seems remarkable, it does not set the benchmark for fastest NHL turnaround.
Bruce Boudreau was fired by Washington Capitals GM George McPhee at approximately 6:15 a.m. ET on the morning of Monday, Nov. 28, 2011. Boudreau received an interesting phone call from Anaheim GM Bob Murray the next day, then did some interviews with Washington media on Wednesday before jumping on a plane that evening bound for Anaheim, where the Ducks beat the Montreal Canadiens 4-1 in a game that ended at 9:22 p.m. local time.
About 40 minutes after the final buzzer, Murray fired Ducks head coach Randy Carlyle and shortly after that, the team announced the hiring of Boudreau. The Associated Press had a short story about the linked transactions online at 10:35 p.m.
That means Boudreau was officially unemployed for about 67 hours, but unofficially employed by Anaheim before he boarded the plane on Wednesday, just over two days after being jettisoned by the Caps. It also means Carlyle was a lame Duck for an entire day, such are the perils of the position.
Don’t worry about the team’s record. Don’t think about how much time is left in the season. And don’t go in there thinking you’ll be able to bench the star centre and play the rookie goalie and turn things upside down.
“Any time you come in, and I’ve done it a couple of times in my career, you can’t just change everything to your liking because players are used to playing a certain way,” said Blues assistant coach Claude Julien, who was a mid-season head coaching replacement for Michel Therrien not once, but twice in Montreal. “You’re hoping that the bump (in player performance) will get you through and, as you go along, you make a little change here, you make a little change there.
“When you see that they’re comfortable with the first change, you’re going to make the second change, etc., but you’ve got to be careful how you do that and I think this is where Monty’s done a great job, and we’re going through that process right now.
You go out of your way to improve communication and make sure to get the team leaders on board first, since the fourth-liners and third-pairing defencemen will be on their best behaviour, lest they lose a roster spot and the big league cheque.
“It all comes down to respect, there’s no doubt,” Julien said. “We’d be lying if we didn’t think as coaches it’s important for us to try and get those top players to buy in and be on your side because they’ve got a lot of power in today’s game, and that’s part of it. But at the end of the day, it’s about trying to get your ideas and your beliefs in their heads and hoping that they buy into those kind of things.”
If you are a GM and you don’t want to tie the can to your coach in November or December, despite the flagging record, you do something else.
Three major-ish trades also have been made this season and none involved any of the franchises that canned their coaches. The struggling Nashville Predators swapped backup goalies with the Colorado Avalanche on Nov. 30 — Justus Annunen and a pick for Scott Wedgewood — before the San Jose Sharks swapped starters with the Avs on Dec. 9, sending Mackenzie Blackwood, a forward and a pick to Colorado for Alexandar Georgiev, a forward and two picks. In between those deals, the New York Rangers dealt captain Jacob Trouba to the Anaheim Ducks for a pick and a prospect.
GM Barry Trotz stopped short of giving Brunette the proverbial vote of confidence, saying instead that he is patient.
However, Brunette has been given short odds of becoming the next coaching casualty. Should that happen, his replacement will be tasked with beating longer odds against making the playoffs. Before the drop of the puck this year, NHL teams had made 313 mid-season coaching changes — including 29 occasions when an interim bench boss was installed prior to the new head coach — and only 113 of those teams, or 40%, qualified for post-season play in that same season.
Seven of those teams went on to lose in the Stanley Cup final and seven won the Cup.
Dick Irvin was the first to turn the ultimate outhouse-to-penthouse trick with Toronto in 1931-32. After the Leafs went 0-3-2 under Art Duncan, Irvin took the reins for a 23-15-5 ride into the post-season. The Leafs swept the Rangers in three games to win the Cup.
Al MacNeil pulled it off with the Montreal Canadiens in 1970-71. He came on board as an assistant coach that fall and, on Dec. 3 of 1970, replaced Claude Ruel. The Habs beat Chicago for the Cup in seven games, but it was not all sweetness and light for MacNeil, who incurred the ire of Henri Richard after benching him in Game 5. Prior to Game 6, the Pocket Rocket called MacNeil the worst coach he had ever played for, then scored the Cup-winning goal in Game 7. By that summer, MacNeil was back coaching in the minors.
The New Jersey Devils famously swapped out Robbie Ftorek for Larry Robinson with eight games remaining in the 1999-2000 season and GM Lou Lamoriello came away looking like a genius for pulling the trigger at that late date when Jason Arnott scored the double-overtime Cup-winning goal in Game 6 against the Dallas Stars.
The 2018-19 Blues tied the can to Mike Yeo in mid-November after a 7-9-3 limp from the starting gate, Craig Berube jumped from associate to interim head coach, but on Jan. 1, the Blues were still dead last in the NHL. Berube then tapped 25-year-old goalie Jordan Binnington on the shoulder, the team went 30-10-5 through the second half, and rode his .914 save percentage and 2.46 goals against average to a Stanley Cup.
The 2015-16 Penguins fired Mike Johnston and brought up Mike Sullivan from their AHL farm team, the Pens caught fire and beat San Jose in the Cup final.
The 2011-12 L.A. Kings fired Terry Murray with the team at 13-12-4, went 2-2 under interim John Stevens, then brought in Darryl Sutter, who had been out of the game for five years. The Kings went 25-13-11 under Sutter, then lost just four playoff games en route to a Cup title.
And the Pittsburgh Penguins first did it in 2008-09 when they dumped Therrien in February, with the team hovering around the .500 mark. In came Dan Bylsma from their AHL farm team and the Pens went 18-3-4 down the stretch and won the franchise’s first Cup since 1992.
The teams that came oh-so-close to pulling off the switch-and-celebrate — by losing in the Cup final — were the 2023-24 Edmonton Oilers with new coach Kris Knoblauch, the 2020-21 Canadiens with Dominique Ducharme, the 2019-20 Dallas Stars under Bowness, the 2009-10 Philadelphia Flyers with Laviolette, the 1981-82 Vancouver Canucks with Neilson, the St. Louis Blues of 1967-68 with Scotty Bowman, and Punch Imlach’s 1958-59 Toronto Maple Leafs.
When you go there and you win two President’s Trophies and you win a Stanley Cup in your second year as a head coach, you figure that you were doing something right.
But even winning a Cup is not a guarantee of job security, as Terry Crisp found out in Calgary in the spring of 1990. He was fired May 7, less than a year after winning it all.
“I was mad. I was irritated. I was not happy,” Crisp said. “When you go there and you win two President’s Trophies and you win a Stanley Cup in your second year as a head coach, you figure that you were doing something right.
“And I had a great team. Don’t get me wrong. Badger Bob Johnson left me in a good state of coaching with what he did and what Cliff Fletcher had put together. I stepped into a pretty damn good sleigh. And you just get a hold of the reins and keep it on track. And that’s what we did.
“And I had some good assistant coaches. I hired Tom Watt, my favourite curmudgeon, who was a diehard defensive coach, which I enjoyed. And then Doug Risebrough, who was a competitor and won Cups with Montreal. So, yeah, I stepped into a good thing. But you had to keep it going.”
Crisp said Fletcher painted him a vivid picture of the job requirements, letting him know that the team’s ownership group had only one desire.
“Cliff said all the owners here want is a ring,” Crisp said. “These owners don’t need money. They have all the money they’ll ever need. They want a ring. Your job is to get a ring. This is my first NHL coaching job with Cliff Fletcher and he laid it out straight to me. So, when you win a Cup, you figure, well, you know, maybe things are OK. But, like I said, it’s a funny career.”
Winning two Cups with the same franchise produces more of a lasting glow, but not every one of the 17 men who have done it were able to call their own shot on the way out the door.
Three of them eventually got the gong: Darryl Sutter in Los Angeles, Joel Quenneville in Chicago and Imlach, who was famously fired from the dual roles of GM and head coach by team president Stafford Smythe in April 1969, about two minutes after his Leafs were swept by the high-powered Bruins in a playoff series.
“The reason? We went into the expansion draft as Stanley Cup champions and two years later we haven’t won a game in the playoffs,” Smythe said. “I told him two minutes ago, I said it’s the end of the Imlach era. I’m paying him off on the last year of his contract. When you’ve done the kind of job he has, you at least deserve that.”
It would surprise few followers of the Maple Leafs to know that Toronto has hired more head coaches than any other NHL franchise, but for the Blackhawks, each with 41. The New York Rangers are next up with 37, Boston with 30, Montreal and Detroit with 28 each.
One of the first expansion franchises, St. Louis, is right there with 28 as well and the Blues own the outright record for mid-season coaching changes with a whopping 25 in their 57-year history.
The Rangers have made 20 in-season changes in 98 years, the Blackhawks 19, so no other franchise has embraced carnage like St. Louis. The Blues made in-season changes for six consecutive years in the 1970s.
It used to be different. When Toronto’s Billy Reay was fired in November 1958 after a 5-12-3 start, he became the first head coach to get the in-season pink slip since the fall of 1931. For 27 blissful years in a league that held between six and nine teams, every single head coach went wire-to-wire before some were ultimately relieved of their duties in the off-season. There was a natural rhythm to it, a sense of how and when things were supposed to be done, perhaps.
All was pretty quiet through the 1960s, with just seven mid-season moves made, before all hell broke loose in the 1970s. Expansion had doubled the NHL’s membership to 12 teams in 1967 and, five years later, the league was warring openly with the World Hockey Association for talent — on the ice and behind the bench.
“From a press box standpoint, any man who accepts a Major League hockey coaching job for less than $100,000 per year is stark, raving insane. … In Major League hockey’s present era of enlightened self-interest, a coach has approximately the same job security as a male masseur in one of Toronto’s topless body-rub establishments.”
He longed for the good, old days when coaches hung around awhile. Jack Adams spent 20 years in Detroit, Irvin got 15 and Toe Blake 13 in Montreal, and Lester Patrick had a run of 13 with the Rangers.
The tide had turned so dramatically since expansion that some coaches made noises about forming a union. Fred Shero brought it up in 1978, and various people in and out of the profession kicked that can around the rink for years to come. In 1979, then NHL Players Association czar Alan Eagleson — this was before he went to jail for fraud and embezzlement — said he would help out the coaches as an advisor if they ever got serious about forming a union.
The Roger Neilson incident, and doesn’t that sound ominous, had shone an unflattering spotlight on the coaching profession’s woeful lack of protection and power. Before a game in Montreal on March 1, 1979, the Leafs’ bombastic owner Harold Ballard made it known he would fire Neilson if they lost, which the Buds did by a score of 2-1.
News reports indicate Ballard did not fire Neilson in person, but in the immediate aftermath of the game, somewhere in the bowels of the Forum, Ballard told Toronto TV host Dick Beddoes that Neilson was done. Beddoes broadcast the scoop but Neilson did not hear it.
The next morning, after Neilson had shown up for work as usual at Maple Leaf Gardens, he was asked by GM Jim Gregory to resign. Neilson refused and was then fired by Gregory, clearly at the behest of Ballard.
The news was greeted with anger from media, fans and most influentially, the players. Two days later, after a few alternative coaches declined the job and the players had implored Ballard to rethink his actions, Neilson was back behind the bench as the Leafs beat Philly 4-3.
Ballard tried to bully Neilson into wearing a paper bag over his head, then unmasking himself on the bench for TV cameras and the Gardens faithful. Neilson almost agreed, but was talked out of it by a friend.
A couple of hours before the game Ballard called it “the greatest promotion I ever put on. Neilson is the coach. He wasn’t fired, he was just put on furlough for a day or two.”
That wasn’t true. And that was no way to treat an employee.
“The time has come for professional hockey coaches to band together,” Coleman wrote in the aftermath of that debacle, “to provide themselves with some protection from the hare-brained whims of club owners.”
Three years later, nothing much had changed. Tom Watt had just turned the Winnipeg Jets from the 9-57-14 league doormat of 1981 to a 33-33-14 playoff-bound team in the spring of 1982 — the greatest year-over-year turnaround in NHL history — and was seen as the obvious choice for coach of the year.
In late March he sounded off on the treatment of the two previous Jack Adams Award winners, Red Berenson and Pat Quinn, both of whom got the axe despite guiding their teams to winning records in St. Louis and Philadelphia respectively.
“I look at this sort of thing as a slap at the profession,” Watt told Canadian Press. “It makes you wonder why bright, young guys would ever want to get into coaching. This season we’ve had six outright firings, three cases of job exchanges within the same organization and two enforced holidays. And the season isn’t over … When we come into this business, we accept as inevitable that we’ll be gone as soon as things go bad. But maybe we shouldn’t accept that so readily.”
He wasn’t advocating formation of a union, rather recognition and respect.
People refuse to consider coaching a legitimate profession. They prefer to think of it as an avocation or as a way of putting something back into the game.
“Coaching is my profession. It’s not the only way I can earn a living, it’s the way I’ve chosen to earn a living,” Watt said. “But in Canada, people refuse to consider coaching a legitimate profession. They prefer to think of it as an avocation or as a way of putting something back into the game.”
He was angered by the fact that Quinn had the Flyers eight points ahead of the Jets, but was fired because “he couldn’t deliver an impossible expectation” of a Stanley Cup contender in what was then a 21-team league.
“That leaves 20 teams who can’t (win it),” Watt said. “Firing every coach who doesn’t win the Stanley Cup is ridiculous.”
The 1981-82 season was in fact ridiculous and it still stands as the most volatile in NHL history for head coaches, with 10 mid-season changes made. Watt went on to win the Jack Adams Award as coach of the year, but was fired by the Jets in the fall of 1983 after they stumbled out of the gate at 4-9-2.
According to hockey-reference.com, NHL teams made 60 in-season changes through the 1980s, a number basically matched in the 2000s, with 58. The 1990s were quieter, with just 42 mid-season changes made, but the decade was not without its memorable moves.
The Washington Capitals got younger behind their bench on Jan. 15, 1990, when they fired 47-year-old Bryan Murray and replaced him with his 39-year-old brother Terry, who had been the organization’s minor league head coach in Baltimore. The Caps were in an eight-game losing skid and ranked among the league’s bottom-feeders. GM David Poile had seen enough.
“I’m as big a believer in Bryan Murray as anybody can possibly be in hockey,” Poile said. “We didn’t get rid of a bad person for this. We didn’t get rid of a lousy coach. We have made a change. We’re going in a different direction. It’s a change for change’s sake.”
Bryan Murray, who said at the time that he was disappointed for himself but happy for Terry, became GM in Florida in 1994 and hired his brother as head coach in 1998. They were both fired by team president Bill Torrey in late December 2000, after the Panthers had won just two of 17 home games.
There were 37 mid-season changes in the 2010s — none at all during the 2017-18 campaign — but the 2020s might be the worst of all, given that 32 mid-season changes have already been made. When Toronto fired Sheldon Keefe last May, only five head coaches had been in their jobs for more than two seasons.
“I do have thoughts on that,” Dallas coach Peter DeBoer told Canadian Press last spring. “It’s insanity. … We coach in an age where everyone talks about the modern athlete, building relationships in order to coach them. And how do you do that with that kind of turnover? It’s like going on a date and getting married and divorced before the appetizers show up.”
All that said, if the NHL career of one man most accurately personifies the coaching profession, Keenan’s track record probably comes closer than Bowman’s.
Sure, Bowman was behind a bench for 2,141 regular season games, more than any of the 396 other men who have been head coaches in the league. Yes, he won more games and Stanley Cups than anyone else — a lot more. He was twice named the Jack Adams Award winner as coach of the year too, and is widely seen as the best there has ever been.
But Bowman was never fired from a head coaching job, and that makes him more of a unicorn than a poster boy. He resigned in St. Louis, Montreal and Buffalo, refused a long-term contract offer in Pittsburgh, and retired in Detroit.
Keenan, on the other hand, was fired by Philadelphia, Florida, Vancouver, Calgary, St. Louis and Kunlun Red Star of the Kontinental Hockey League for heaven’s sakes, and that grim reality is far more the norm for people in the profession.
I would say getting fired, you can see the red dot on your chest. Most times it doesn’t come as a surprise when it happens.
Terry Crisp
“It’s sort of like when you win the Stanley Cup the first time, the euphoria you feel for everything you’ve done, you’ve reached the top of the mountain,” he said. “Well, when they hired you for an NHL job and you think there’s only 28 teams or whatever there were, and you’re one of them, you’ve reached the top. So you always remember the first time they phone you, and you get off the phone and you think, wow, I’m gonna get a crack at it. I’m gonna get a chance to see what we can do.”
“And I would say getting fired, you can see the red dot on your chest. Most times it doesn’t come as a surprise when it happens.”
After all, teams in trouble need to do something to reverse their fortunes and there are usually signs that a head coach is past his best-before date with a given roster of players. If they make the same preventable mistakes night after night, if there is no push-back after a particularly bad setback, he may have lost the room.
“What’s that old saying? You’ve got 21 players and seven love you, seven hate you, and the other seven aren’t decided,” Crisp said with a chuckle. “You’ve got to get the seven undecided to vote for you. Like in politics. And I think it’s sort of like that because you’re going to have players who will find a way to blame the coach and you’re going to find players that appreciate the coach.
They’ve buried 21 coaches in Chicago. They aren’t fooling me. I know that they’re ordering another nice marble headstone with my name carved on it.
Everybody in the game has known the mathematical realities for a long time indeed and they do not favour the coach over the player. When Rudy Pilous took the head coaching job in Chicago in January 1958, he did it with eyes wide open. He was joining one of the most volatile of the Original Six franchises.
“They’ve buried 21 coaches in Chicago,” he reportedly told Coleman, who had a particular sympathy for the tenuous plight of NHL bench bosses. “They aren’t fooling me. I know that they’re ordering another nice marble headstone with my name carved on it.”
Pilous was actually the Hawks’ 20th different head coach at the time, with Irvin and Bill Tobin crazy enough to go back for more than one helping of humility.
In the summer of 2022, Luke Richardson became the 40th and Sorensen is now the 41st, matching Toronto’s league-leading total. There is a coach’s association but still no union. However, they are now paid handsomely and in full, even if they don’t make it into the new year before the reality of their situations cannot handle the weight of other people’s expectations.
