WANTED: Individual willing to take full blame for blunders of both upper management and employees. Will be grilled on performance in public every other night. Will be second-guessed on all decisions. Eventual firing a certainty, regardless of previous success. Must have own skates.
The other day it was the Toronto Maple Leafs kissing off Paul Maurice. Last weekend, Colorado sacked Joel Quenneville. On Monday, Ron Wilson was told, "Do you know your way out of San Jose?"
Two of those guys were the head coaches of teams that advanced to the second round of the NHL playoffs. One of them, Wilson, was behind the bench of a San Jose Sharks outfit that compiled the league's second-best regular season record (49 wins, 108 points).
Remember former Ottawa Senators head coach John Paddock? He was behind the bench for the Eastern Conference team at the all-star game in January. In February, he was unemployed.
The list goes on. There are currently six head coaching vacancies in the NHL (Toronto, Ottawa, San Jose, Colorado, Florida and Atlanta) and another three could soon come available in Vancouver, Carolina and Tampa, where Alain Vigneault, Peter Laviolette and John Tortorella, respectively, aren't buying any green bananas.
Vigneault was the NHL's coach of the year last season. Laviolette (2006) and Tortorella (2004) each won a Stanley Cup in the last four years.
So, seriously, why would anyone -- or at least any sane person -- pursue an occupation that in most instances has the career span of a Chinese toy tester?
What kind of person aspires to be an NHL head coach? Perhaps the kind who looks at the guy being shot out of a cannon and says, "Hey, that seems like a pretty cool way to travel."
Well, meet Scott Arniel, yet another moth to the flame, who for the past two seasons has cut his teeth as head coach of the Manitoba Moose. What goes though his noggin when reading the obituaries, er, sports pages to digest the demise of another of his peers?
"It's tough on coaches," Arniel was saying yesterday, fresh back from being inducted into the Kingston Sports Hall of Fame in his hometown. "You have to have results. It's not like you can take a couple years off and maybe the draft helps you out again and you can rebuild and get rejuvenated as a franchise like Pittsburgh or Washington or Chicago."
Take the plight of former Capitals head coach Glen Hanlon, who was fired earlier this season just when the Alexander Ovechkin show was getting off the ground, along with the arrival of talented youngsters like Niklaus Backstrom and defenceman Mike Green. Said Arniel: "No disrespect to Bruce Boudreau, who did a tremendous job coming into Washington, but Glen Hanlon was waiting for those guys (Ovechkin et al) to come."
The key, according to Arniel, is not to just jump at any opening, noting any potential head coach should do his homework first.
"You're going to look at their depth," he said. "You're going to look at the kids they've got coming. You're going to look at the assets they have available right now."
Perhaps even more crucial: Know and trust your boss.
"It's so important that you get aligned with somebody you have a history with, somebody that thinks along the same lines and is going to be patient with you through good times and bad times," Arniel added.
Ever notice that some of the most stable NHL franchises are run by two-headed monsters? There's GM Darcy Regier and longtime head coach Lindy Ruff in Buffalo. There's Kevin Lowe and Craig MacTavish in Edmonton, David Poile and Barry Trotz in Nashville and Brian Burke and Randy Carlyle in Anaheim.
Sure, they'll probably all get fired someday, but not anytime soon. And there's a reason. MacTavish, for example, didn't get any stupider between the time the Oilers reached the 2006 Stanley Cup finals and this year, when they didn't make the playoffs. He's the same coach who this year had to deal with a crippling amount of injuries on a very young roster.
Meanwhile, Quenneville faced a similar challenge this year with the Avs -- made it to the second round of the playoffs and was still fired. But that's not always the answer.
"Changing coaches every two or three years because of the panic button and pressure from the media and pressure from the fans and not sticking to a game plan... what ends up happening is you're always starting over," Arniel reasoned. "Especially these young kids, if they're going through a couple coaches early in the growing process, maybe they don't materialize like you hoped they would because they're getting different coaches and different messages."
Of course, that's a head coach speaking. And one who will someday, if he's lucky, get a taste of his profession's bitter pill at the NHL level.
"I was once told the toughest thing about coaching is the first time you get fired," the Moose bench boss said. "After that, it gets a bit easier."
Wait a minute, it dawned on a scribbler, you haven't been fired yet, have you?
"No, I haven't," Scott Arniel politely demurred. "But let's not go down that road."
randy.turner@freepress.mb.ca
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