The Rookies

There’s something different about the NHL this year. It doesn’t have anything to with anything on the ice  and it isn’t the salary cap. It’s the coaches. In a dramatic reversal from the 2008-2009 season, when a record seven coaches were fired in-season, including two before the end of November, only one coach has been fired so far, Philadelphia’s John Stevens. It’s not just the NHL either; last season, eight different NBA coaches were let go before the end of the regular season, only 2 have been canned so far this year and one of those coaches was New Jersey’s Lawrence Frank, whose team was on the verge of breaking the league record for most losses to start a season when he was axed. In college football, the amount of firings in the BCS conferences before the end of the regular season dropped from 6 to o. Even the NFL, which only saw 3 in-season firings in 2008, has only registered 1 axing this season, Buffalo’s beloved Dick Jauron. The only sport where the early firings didn’t go down was MLB, which once again saw 4 coaches go home before the middle of October.

So what’s behind this newfound patience from the GMs, owners and ADs of pro and college sports? Better coaching? Not particularly. The Nets’ much-maligned losing streak came this year, not last and as for the NHL, the Toronto Maple Leafs and New York Islanders had much worse starts to the season than what cost Chicago’s Denis Savard and Tampa Bay’s Barry Melrose their jobs last autumn. You could also point to the sheer amount of firings last year. Since firing the coach is usually a tactic used to shake up a team or at least make it look like management is trying to shake up the team, pulling the exact same trick the very next year generally doesn’t happen, unless the new coach is just that incompetent and unpopular or the owner’s Al Davis (and even he’s waiting to get rid of Tom Cable this year).

Quite honestly, the lack of a real swinging gate in major sports this year may just be due to the dirty little secret of in-season firings: they don’t work enough. Occasionally, you’ll see something happen like in Pittsburgh, where the Penguins replaced Michel Therrien with Dan Bylsma and won the Stanley Cup but with the vast majority of sudden coaching changes, most teams do just as badly with their new coaches as they did with their old ones. Even those teams which do rally to make the playoffs or a bowl game lose at some point in the postseason,. Given the fact that all of the sports mentioned have been switching coaches in the offseason just as much as usual, it’s probably just smartest to conclude that most teams’ front offices just don’t see any real advantage to speeding up how fast they give out pink slips.