Delonte West Inching Closer to Return
February 4, 2010Cavaliers Preview Game #51: Heat at Cavs
February 4, 2010As we passed along last night, the Blue Jackets and coach Ken Hitchcock have parted ways; Hitchcock was fired yesterday, and assistant Claude Noel was named the interim coach for the remaining 24 games of the season.
Aside from that informative note, I wanted to take some time to react to the move from as many different angles as possible, as there’s no black-and-white look to this issue. There are many aspects of Hitchcock’s tenure that probably merited his firing, but you can’t lay the failures of this team all at his feet.
The Good
Hitchcock was hired in November of 2006, and in 3+ seasons compiled a 125-123-36 record. It’s easy to say he was the best coach in franchise history by quite a wide margin. He led the team to its only Stanley Cup Playoffs berth in franchise history last season. “Hitch came to an organization in disarray, and he’s leaving it in much better shape,” GM Scott Howson said. “He brought structure, credibility and legitimacy to our franchise. We’ve all learned a great deal from him.”
It’s clear that the front office and ownership went out of their way to give Hitchcock every opportunity to turn this season around. Most teams probably would have fired their coach back in December when the team was in the midst of losing 21 out of 24 games. But, you can tell the respect that the franchise has for Hitchcock in giving him as long as they did to right the ship this year. And, beyond that, there is also the fact that he is owed two more years’ worth of salary at $1.33 million per year, and the idea that if he doesn’t find a coaching job this summer the Jackets would consider bringing him back in a front-office kind of role. Howson continued: “We wanted to be patient. We felt we owed that to him. We know he’s an excellent coach, and we kept hoping he’d find a solution, a way to get this turned around. As time wore on, it became apparent that it wasn’t going to happen.”
Hitch deserves credit for two things: 1) he brought instant credibility to the franchise. He has a Stanley Cup ring. He won his 500th game last season, putting him into an exclusive 13-member coaching fraternity. He was known around the league as a good coach. No longer were the Jackets also-rans who could never get the top-flight names to even consider them. They had a guy running the team who was recognizable and respected around the league.
2) He instilled an identity into the team. They became a team last season that no one wanted to play. Before he arrived, the Jackets were perennially the team that opponents ran out their backup goalie and coasted through, only turning on the jets when they had to. And that was usually enough. Hitch molded this team into a group that played physical defense and made other teams earn their points. And, slowly but surely, the approach worked, culminating in a second half of last season in which is appeared everything had finally come together. Yes, the Jackets got swept out of the first round of the playoffs, but it was viewed as a huge step forward, and set the stage for this season to be that next step.
And this season started out well: the team came out firing on all cylinders, winning 12 of their first 20 games and sitting at 26 points near the top of the conference. And then, the swoon hit.
The Bad
This isn’t the first time he’s been run out of a city/team at which he had success. He won a Stanley Cup for Dallas, and was fired during the 2001-2002 season, which was the season after his fifth consecutive Stanley Cup Playoffs appearance which include back-to-back trips to the Finals (winning once in 1998-1999). He had success in Philadelphia with the Flyers—three consecutive playoff seasons–but was fired early in the 2006-2007 season after a slow 1-6-1 start. He was shortly thereafter hired by the Jackets. The records show that Hitch had success pretty much everywhere he coached. So, why was he being fired at the first signs of trouble?
In Philly, the first post-lockout season was again a trip to the playoffs, but a loss in the first round and subsequent exit eight games into the following season. I personally think this was the beginning of the cracks in his facade as a truly “elite” coach. The league changed, and he was forced to change with it, but often-times appeared unable or unwilling to do so. More on that below.
This year, the team lacked passion, lacked heart, and lacked any signs of confidence. One of Hitch’s biggest strengths—his attention to detail in preparation—can also be one of his worst traits when it comes to younger players: they become overloaded by the details. As Derick Brassard put it: “We were always well-prepared for the games. But I think our team was thinking too much in the past few months.” More on Brassard below, too.
Claude Noel—the now-interim head coach of the team—has worked with Hitchcock before in his career, as well. He summed up the implied change in overall philosophy when he said: “I know one thing: Less is going to be more for me. I am not going to hammer own on them (today) with 30 things we want to do in the one game. I’m very confident we are going to get what we want, and we want to get it as quick as we can, but you have to be careful that you aren’t overloading the circuits.” That’s as much an indictment of Hitchcock’s ability to get through to his players as anything I’ve read in the last 24 hours.
And the players, while obviously being political as well, have positive things to say about Noel and his relations to younger guys: “He’s had a good track record of working with young players in the minors,” forward Derek Dorsett said. “He’s won at almost every level, and he’s a coach who will hold us accountable.” Noel was the 2004 AHL Coach of the Year.
When you look at that combined with the youth of this team and the expectations, something was bound to give. And give it did. “Part of it is that we had become fragile,” RJ Umberger said. “Something would go wrong, and the bottom would fall out. We can’t lose sight of the players’ responsibility for how we were playing. Hitch had a plan, and he knew how to coach and develop a team. But we hit a stumbling block, and things just snowballed.”
As for the decision itself, it wasn’t shocking to learn it had been on the table for awhile. GM Scott Howson said: “I started considering the possibility in December, when we were really struggling. We wanted to give Hitch a chance to get it turned around, we felt like he earned that right. But when you watched a lot of our games — the Los Angeles game and the game (Tuesday night vs. Colorado) — we didn’t have a lot of push-back to our game. And that was troubling.”
And he is right; those two games saw the Jackets come out and dominate the first 10 minutes from end to end, only to have one bad thing happen and have the games completely spiral out of control for them. It would get to a point where they simply looked like they didn’t care anymore. That, too, is an indictment of a coach whose players have all but tuned him out for the most part.
The End Result
It’s bittersweet, but sometimes these things are for the best. Sometimes a good influence can only carry a team so far. Sometimes you have to move on to get over the hump. There will be things learned from Hitchcock that will stay with a lot of these players. But, the fact is that this team is young, and the post-lockout, salary-cap era of the NHL has made it younger as well. Teams need a coach that can develop these young guys, and it’s been a knock on Hitch everywhere he’s coached. It became very evident that his ability to adapt to the younger players of the NHL is now in doubt, as guys like Jakub Voracek and Derick Brassard have regressed in their second years when more was expected of them, and rookie Nikita Filatov—for all of his own faults—decided to go back to Russia and play in a lesser league than to sit the bench most of the time while “learning”.
It’s not to say Hitch was *never* successful with young guys. Forward RJ Umberger played for Hitchcock in Philadelphia as well: “I see a lot of similarities now and then. Us young guys in Philadelphia had those exact same meetings, and Hitch would tell us he had the same meetings with (Mike) Modano and (Jere) Lehtinen in Dallas. Looking back, I could see what he was trying to do, pushing us to make us better. That’s all he wanted.”
Looking back is one thing, and those three players are more the exception than the rule. Derick Brassard, for one, sure seemed to be more polite than upset: “I respect that he tried to help me and all the young guys. He was really patient with us. Some guys will say he was not right for the young players, and he was hard on us. He knew what we were about to face, and he was getting us to be NHL players. We were always well-prepared for the games. But I think our team was thinking too much in the past few months.”
Finally, as Rick Nash put it: “It’s pretty obvious that the message just wasn’t getting through. We’ve lost a lot of games this season. Nobody expects us to have a season like this. When that happens, it’s usually the coach that gets it.”
The Fallout
This definitely has the potential to both help and hurt the team. Perhaps this is a wake-up call for a roster of players who seem unaffected by losing. They lack heart on a consistent basis (with a few exceptions, of course), and it takes a lot to seemingly get them riled up enough to go out and play with total reckless abandon. So, obviously, there’s a hole there that perhaps a new voice on the bench can fill.
In addition, if they can bring in a guy that can get the young players back on track and progressing and developing again, it would be a win for the Jackets, of course. Remember, the Penguins fired their coach mid-season last year, brought in a fresh, younger voice, and went on a run to win the Stanley Cup.
But, firing the coach doesn’t always solve all ills. If the players continue to appear largely unmotivated, the team won’t magically start winning with a new guy on the bench. As the old adage goes, coaches coach and players play. They still have to execute. Losing Hitch does damage the credibility of the franchise, though that can be fixed by winning.
And finally, as most Browns fans know, firing your coach means you have to hire a new coach, and the prospects of doing that can always be both good and bad, depending on how the search-and-hire process is handled and what coach is hired. Scott Howson all but said he wasn’t actively looking for a new coach until the off-season (which I view as a mistake; you shouldn’t fire your coach unless you have ideas for his replacement already in mind, and you shouldn’t wait), but then again he could also just be acting politically since some of the mentioned candidates are still gainfully employed by other organizations.
The Prospects
In addition to interviewing current assistants (and now interim coach) Claude Noel, Gord Murphy, and Gary Agnew, the name that has been most kicked around by the fan base is former Jacket player Kevin Dineen. He now coaching in the Buffalo Sabres’ system. Dineen played from 1984 through 2002 in the NHL, finishing his career in Columbus after being picked up in the expansion draft. He was a fan favorite from the jump, and would be welcomed coming back.
Other candidates will most likely surface as the season winds to a close.
6 Comments
DERP. Ain’t no room for no hockey round these parts, not in Ohio! SUBSTANDARD SPORT FOR A SUBSTANDARD CITY!! DERP!!!
Thought I’d get that out of the way.
Sucks that he’s gone but it seems like of all the major sports (DERP HOCKEY ISN’T A MAJOR SPORT LIKE FOOOBAWWWW), hockey tends to have a coaching turnover that’s extremely quick.
And also has the best chance for a quick turnaround, given the economics of the game now and the reliance on young talent. The Penguins canned their coach midway through the year last season and won a freaking championship.
It was nice to have an established coach here in Columbus for a while. Its too bad things didn’t work out. I hope we can find a new guy with the player rapport thats needed to take the team to the next level.
Btw NJ just pulled off a deal for Kovalchulk and showed that you can’t be afraid to go out and make a deal to try and ensure a championship. I hope Danny Ferry is a hockey fan and saw this!
[…] some of the dust has settled from the firing of Ken Hitchcock. The Claude Noel Era has officially begun, and Noel now has a 24-game audition to try to land the […]
[…] this off-season is to identify and hire the coach to take the Jackets to the next level. Lost in the firing of Ken Hitchcock is the fact that he brought a lot of things to this franchise that it sorely needed: legitimacy, […]