COACHING CULTURE SHIFT

Here are a couple of excellent articles about the Hitchcock firing in Columbus but with a larger commentary on the direction, or requirements, of the current NHL coaching model.

After you peruse these consider this, the Detroit Red Wings have the best coach in hockey in Mike Babcock and he is every bit as hard driving and demanding as Hitch and his ilk. The difference though is that the organization he coaches for puts their young players where young players should be – in the minors. When they are ready for the National Hockey League they elevate them. Case in point, goalie Jimmy Howard who has almost single-handedly kept them in the playoff hunt.

Bad organizations make excuses for pressing young players into impact roles.

Great ones develop their youth, and expect no excuses when they finally arrive.

The Detroit Red Wings are a great organization.

The Columbus Blue Jackets currently aren’t, and the jury is out on whether they ever will be.


CNN/Sports Illustrated / Hitchcock firing another ominous sign for veteran NHL coaches
Jim Kelley

Ken Hitchcock has a Stanley Cup ring that he richly deserves, despite the controversial winning goal by Brett Hull. He has 533 NHL wins, good for 13th all time in a league that seldom celebrates coaching success. He was part of Team Canada's gold medal at the 2002 Winter Olympics. He has the respect and even admiration of many NHL GMs who appreciate his indefatigable work ethic and commitment to defense, and their value in shaping a team's identity.

Hitchcock led the Blue Jackets to the only NHL playoff appearance in their history. He will reprise his role with Team Canada in Vancouver. It's a better than even chance that he'll be part of a medal-winning effort once again.

But what the 58-year-old Hitchcock doesn't have, or so it seems, is a rapport with young players.

Blue Jackets GM Scott Howson relieved Hitchcock of his head coaching duties on Wednesday, a day after an uninspired 5-1 loss to a team, the Colorado Avalanche, that is having success largely because of the young players in its lineup. In today's NHL, not relating to youth appears to be the No. 1 reason why good coaches with a world of experience in doing things their way are finding themselves on the unemployment line.

Not that anyone will admit that.

"This season has been very disappointing for the Blue Jackets organization and our fans and the responsibility for that rests with all of us from management to the coaches and players," Howson said in a press release. "Hitch worked tirelessly to build an identity for this team that was missing before he arrived and he deserves a great deal of credit for those efforts. He earned and received the opportunity to turn things around this season, but unfortunately that has not happened and it has become apparent that change is in the best interest of our organization."

Howson's not wrong and he's not being unfair. He just left out the part that has been whispered about Hitchcock even last season when Columbus had some success and a playoff appearance, and especially since mid-November.

Peopled with young players including Olympian Rick Nash up front and the talented but still inexperienced Steve Mason in goal, the Blue Jackets simply weren't connecting with their coach. Throw in the fact that they lost 2008 first-round draft pick Nikita Filatov to Russia reportedly because he didn't like Hitchcock using ice time as a carrot and stick to convince him to play defense, and the veteran coach clearly had problems that went beyond Mason's spectacular fall-off from a season ago. Hitchcock then became the 23rd NHL head coach who has been replaced since June 2008. Anyone who says they are surprised is either lying or horribly uninformed.

Eighteen months and a nearly 75 percent turnover rate behind the benches. The amazing thing regarding Hitchcock's tenure in Columbus (he had previously been fired in Dallas and Philadelphia) is that he lasted as long as he did. He coached there for 26 months, his winning record (125-123-36) depending upon what you think of overtime and shootouts, but he was 10-20-7 since Nov. 19 and his 22-26-9 overall was good for 14th place in the Western Conference. That meant Hitchcock, who is also said to have had conflicts with the superbly talented but painfully young Derick Brassard, was out of time.

The surprising thing is that Hitchcock wasn't replaced by an up-and-comer from the AHL or even a hot junior coach, the two trendy replacements for aging bench bosses because they are said to better "relate" to today's youth-rushed talent. Howson turned to 54-year-old assistant coach Claude Noel, if only on an interim basis.

Since the salary cap took hold coming out of the 2004-05 lockout, young players have become something of a precious commodity in the league. Entry-level contracts come cheap, far cheaper than experienced players even if they are pretty much just third- or fourth-line performers. Cheap is good for franchises that yearn to stay well under what is now seen as an excessively high cap figure of $56.8 million. That opens the door to youngsters, many of whom are seen as talent that must produce now. The experienced veterans, it is hoped, will come later.

Fine for the kids, especially the truly talented ones, but woe to the coach who prefers players who know their role and how to execute it.

Are you reading this Andy Murray? Did the St. Louis Blues at least tell you the truth behind closed doors?

No GM is going to send a coach off into his good night with the reputation of not being able to work with kids. That's why you hear things like "the team was not progressing" even though many of the players currently on the St. Louis and Columbus rosters were simply going through the learning experience that comes with having success early and then falling back as teams play against them with greater intensity.

Still, you have to wonder if Murray or Hitchcock will get another chance in the now youth-conscious NHL. You also have to wonder if once the Blue Jackets move past Noel (or the 54-yer old shows them that he can relate to their kids), Howson won't be placing a call to Filatov.

Mother Russia looks nice right now, but NHL money, a spot on Nash's wing and no one harping about defensive play can be a powerful lure...especially for a GM who has lost a potential franchise player.




ESPN / Post-lockout era not kind to Hitchcock
Burnside By Scott Burnside

Let's start with this.

No one talks the game of hockey better than Ken Hitchcock.

No one better articulates the nuances of the game, the back story of how and why a player or team plays, how and why they react under certain situations, what makes them tick or not.

Watch how reporters congregate around Hitchcock wherever he happens to be, like moths to a flame.

It was so in Philadelphia when he coached in that hockey hotbed, and ask any reporter who covered the team if they miss their daily hockey chats with the funny, insightful, often biting Hitchcock.

It was so when reporters gathered for the Canadian Olympic orientation camp this past August in Calgary, where Hitchcock was reprising his role as an assistant with the Canadian team.

And it will be so when reporters from around the world gather to cover the Olympic hockey tournament in Vancouver in a little more than a week.

The difference is, when Hitchcock arrives in Vancouver, he will speak not as an NHL coach, but an unemployed one, as he was relieved of his duties as the bench boss of the Columbus Blue Jackets late Wednesday afternoon.

The fact the firing doesn't come as much of a shock for a team that has stumbled through the first 58 games of this season (22-27-9) says as much about the Blue Jackets organization as it does Hitchcock's ability as a coach.

Still, the post-lockout NHL has not been kind to Hitchcock.

After taking the Philadelphia Flyers to Game 7 of the 2004 Eastern Conference finals, a series they lost to the eventual Stanley Cup champs from Tampa Bay, Hitchcock's Flyers were waxed in the first round in 2006 by a faster, more skilled Buffalo team. Philly was embarrassed twice in that series by scores of 8-2 and 7-1, a harbinger of what was to come for Hitchcock and the Flyers.

The team started the next season off poorly and Hitchcock was fired on Oct. 22. The Flyers went on to finish dead last in the NHL, while Hitchcock was unemployed for exactly one month before Columbus snapped him up.

The Blue Jackets were a moribund franchise that had quickly fiddled away the honeymoon period of their existence in Columbus. Hitchcock, in large part because of his ability to articulate the game, soon became the face of the franchise, even bigger than star player Rick Nash.

He coached his brains out and the Blue Jackets went 28-29-5 through the balance of the 2006-07 season. The team was 34-36-12 in his first full season in Columbus before breaking through last season as he guided the Jackets to the playoffs for the first time. The Blue Jackets swooned down the stretch in 2008-09, winning just twice in their last eight games and were swept in the first round by second-seeded Detroit.

But the buzz returned to Columbus with the expectation that this team was ready to step forward again this season, following the trends of other young teams like Pittsburgh and Washington.

It didn't happen. Not even close.

Steve Mason, last season's rookie of the year and the main reason the Blue Jackets enjoyed such success, went off the rails. The young players who were supposed to carry the team forward, like Nikita Filatov, Jakub Voracek, Derick Brassard and Derek Dorsett, by and large did not progress in the way the team needed. (Filatov went home to Russia in a snit over playing time.) Brassard has just seven goals, Voracek eight.

Was that Hitchcock's fault, an inability to coax more out of young players? Or was it a failure on the part of GM Scott Howson to provide the appropriate tools and leadership to get the team out of the funk that saw it win just three times in 24 outings between Nov. 21 and Jan. 5?

Hitchcock, always tough on his players and especially tough on his top players, was credited with helping franchise forward Nash develop into a complete hockey player. If it's true Nash chafed under Hitchcock's tutelage, it wouldn't be the first star player to be at odds with a coach with a big personality. If it's true, it will now be up to Nash to show he is a leader and not a coach killer.

Back in 2005-06, Hitchcock's Flyers seemed ill-suited to play in the post-lockout NHL. GM Bob Clarke also fell on the sword, which seemed to suggest it was as much the tools in the box as the man wielding them.

This time, Hitchcock took the fall alone. Time will tell whether Howson found the right handyman behind the bench in longtime minor league coach Claude Noel, who takes over on an interim basis, or just a cheap replacement for the highly paid, high-profile Hitchcock.

As for Hitchcock, we figure he won't be long unemployed again, although it may take him longer than a month. His is a big personality, and we imagine him going toe to toe with the media in Toronto if GM Brian Burke grows tired of Ron Wilson's failures there. And it's certainly not hard to imagine Hitchcock returning to his roots in Western Canada if things continue to go south in Calgary and ownership decides to de-Sutter the Flames this offseason.

In the interim, there are the Olympics. A gold medal turn by Canada in Vancouver over the next few weeks will go a long way in restoring the mythology surrounding Hitchcock as one of the game's great coaching minds.

A failure there will extend Hitchcock's post-lockout misery and further tarnish the reputation of a man who can talk the game like no one else, but whose ability to coach the new game is now, sadly, in question.