Just like Kings, a new coach won't make a difference for Blackhawks
Just because something is seen as inevitable doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.
Chicago made years of whispers and rumors manifest, firing Joel Quenneville because it couldn’t fire all the players Stan Bowman overpaid. And because Quenneville didn’t have access to a time machine. And because the salary cap was meant to be fair to everyone, and not just the teams that draft well.
It’s really that simple. Those three factors are what led to the firing of a coach who by any reasonable measure is the most successful — and therefore best — of the NHL’s salary cap era.
Chicago got out to a hot start this season, yes, and that sparked a lot of “Ah, they might be back for one last ride!” speculation that was hilariously shortsighted even at the time. They won three of their first five, and didn’t lose the other two in regulation. Not bad, but never going to last since all three wins were also in OT.
They have just seven points from their last 10 games, and that kinda feels about right. It was a five-game losing streak — albeit with four games on the road — that got Quenneville canned.
And obviously you understand why it happened because, again, while this is by no means Quenneville’s fault, Bowman isn’t gonna fire himself and can’t do anything about the roster midseason. Or, because of its various problems, over this past summer.
Look, there are going to be a lot of eulogies about this team in the next few days and all of them will say unequivocally that Quenneville was instrumental in this team’s success. Obviously it’s not just his work that got three current players from this group’s core named to the NHL’s top 100 players of all time, but is Duncan Keith the borderline Hall of Famer he is right now without Quenneville? Is Patrick Kane? Is Jonathan Toews?
In the end, you can’t outrun time, I guess, and you can’t outrun $6.875 million for Brent Seabrook, or a combined $21 million for Toews and Kane, and that Saad-for-Panarin trade, and that Saad-for-Anismiov trade, and losing Niklas Hjalmarsson, and probably also the Dustin Byfuglien and Andrew Ladd cap crunch eight years ago, and so on and so forth.
On and on the excuses can go, for sure, but the fact is that Bowman managed this roster rather poorly in trying to keep the core together even as its power clearly faded. If Bowman didn’t manage it into the ground, he still brought down its cruising altitude to levels that left it vulnerable to crashing into any moderately sized mountain. And here we are.
The universal response to this decision has been two-fold: “I get why it happened, but…” and “Half the NHL is going to be looking to fire their coach by noon.” Both are correct. Bowman really blew it with cap management almost from the beginning, identifying the wrong guys as drivers of success, making the wrong choices in trades, and generally making the Peter Chiarelli-esque mistakes of being loyal to a fault.
The thing you heard when, say, the Toews and Kane extensions were announced was, “What were they gonna do, lose one of them?” And the answer now, as then, was, “I guess so, yeah.” Not that trading Toews for a package of really good pieces when he was 27 would guarantee continued success to the levels seen in the past, but at least it might give you a chance to keep winning and allow you to avoid firing the best coach in the league.
Everyone is on Quenneville’s side here, as it should be. When Bowman has the press availability to talk about this decision, he’s gonna get deservedly grilled. The, shall we say, differences in opinion between the guy in the big office and the guy behind the bench were pretty well-known to anyone paying even a little bit of attention and for Bowman to throw Quenneville off the lifeboat now is just opportunism and, as with Rob Blake, a desperate man trying to save a job he probably doesn’t deserve anymore.
Chicago’s in desperate need of a rebuild and Bowman is trying to forestall or distract from that. That’s plain to see. Maybe Quenneville isn’t the guy you want for your rebuild, for whatever reason. But if you’re talking yourself out of the most successful coach of the last 13 years, well, you’re probably not making a good decision.
When Quenneville comes back to Chicago with the Blue Jackets or Oilers or Blues later this season, he’s gonna get a Jordan comeback-level standing ovation from the United Center crowd. And then Quenneville’s new team will probably beat Bowman’s 4-1.
Because it’s been proven everywhere he’s ever coached: If you give Joel Quenneville a roster that’s even pretty good, he’s gonna have that roster playing better than it probably should. St. Louis, Colorado, Chicago.
All the results were better than his predecessor and, as we’ll soon see for poor Jeremy Colliton, his successor as well.
—
Ryan Lambert is a Yahoo! Sports hockey columnist. His email is here and his Twitter is here.
All stats via Corsica unless otherwise noted.
More NHL coverage from Yahoo Sports
