Casually, two very successful coaches have been removed from the NHL over the past few days. In both cases, it is difficult to find logical arguments to justify these decisions.
Last week, New York Islanders GM Lou Lamoriello announced that coach Barry Trotz had been removed.
The Islanders advanced to the Stanley Cup semifinals in 2020 and 2021, however. Before Trotz arrived in 2018, the team had only won one playoff series in 25 years. He won five of his first three seasons behind the bench.
Since Trotz took over in 2018, the Islanders have become the NHL’s second -largest defensive team. This is despite the fact that they gave heavy lifts to four goalkeepers (Ilya Sorokin, Robin Lehner, Thomas Greiss and Semyon Varlamov) this season.
After their elimination last summer, they enjoyed a very short off-season. They started the 2021-22 season with 13 straight games because their new arena wasn’t ready yet. And they went to an 11-game defeat on that endless journey. Although they became competitive again afterwards, the Islanders never recovered from this bad patch.
Instead of giving the benefit of the doubt to a coach who won the Stanley Cup and was the third -most win in NHL history, Lou Lamoriello simply decided to fire him. Lane Lambert, who has been Trotz’s assistant since he moved to Nashville in 2011, will manage the Islanders.
In Vegas, Golden Knights CEO and President Kelly McCrimmon and George McPhee announced the ouster of Peter DeBoer on Monday.
Like Trotz, DeBoer led the Golden Knights to the semi-finals in 2020 and 2021. In 2020-21, his team averaged .732, a victory of only 9 out of 636 teams that participated in The NHL since the early 2000s has coped. To achieve.
The Golden Knights, like the Islanders, had a very short break during the summer. And this season, more than 500 games have been missed by their players due to injury. Ultimately, for the first time in five years, the Golden Knights missed the playoffs by three points.
Mark Stone and Max Pacioretty have not played in half of the games. Jack Eichel didn’t either, as McCrimmon and McPhee got him from the Sabers before he underwent delicate neck surgery that required lengthy rehabilitation. Not to mention the fact that the number one goalkeeper, Robin Lehner, has been injured for almost half the season.
Kelly McCrimmon and George McPhee eliminated Gerard Gallant despite a strong 118-75-20 record in just two seasons, and they did the same to DeBoer despite his 98-50-12 record.
After five seasons of existence marked by one participation in the final and two presences over four aces, the Golden Knights are already looking for a third coach.
Not too serious.
Last December, following the dismissal of two NHL coaches, I published this text in which coaching experts Alain Lachance and François Rodrigue lamented the culture of dismissal that still exists in North American professional sport.
They point out that for more than 20 years, the scientific literature has revealed the importance of psychological safety within work groups, and in all sectors of activity.
Without psychological safety, we must say goodbye to creativity, risk, and change. As a result, performance and long -term results are discarded! Both of these coaches will not take the time to develop new tactics or strategies and go back to what they always did. Slowly but surely, they will slip behind the parade, because above all they must not make a mistake, otherwise their position is in danger.please two experts.
It is for this reason, they add, that more and more top -level organizations (mainly in Europe) are investing in support teams aimed at making their coach more effective. In particular by allowing him to step back and think differently about his work.
One of the questions Lachance and Rodrigue asked a few months ago is still relevant: instead of paying Barry Trotz ($ 4 million) and Peter DeBoer ($ 3.5 million) to stay at home, don’t count the salaries of their successors, wouldn’t it have been more worthwhile to spend a few hundred thousand dollars to support them and help them become better?
To back up their case, the two experts cited a study that found that in NCAA college football, change in coaching generates only 0.5 more wins, on average, over five years.
In the NHL, regardless of whether you lead a winning or losing organization, the results of coaching expulsions are also mixed.
Many experts argue that stability is a factor of success in the sport, and it makes perfect sense.
In the past 10 seasons, the five most seasoned NHL teams (Washington, Boston, Pittsburgh, Tampa Bay and Saint Louis) have averaged 2.8 coaches compared to 4.4 for the five less successful teams (Ottawa, Detroit, New Jersey, Arizona and Buffalo).
That said, it’s fun to note that even among the most successful teams, so betting on a more competitive roster, only five of the nine coaching changes have made a positive jump in the standings from one season to the next.
On the side of the underperforming teams, only 6 of the 17 coaching changes were followed by a recovery in the rankings, mostly slight, which then subsided.
Next season, the New York Islanders and Vegas Golden Knights are likely to get more wins than this year, and the leaders of those two teams will no doubt feel they’ve done their job well.
These improved results, however, may have more to do with the fact that these teams will not experience the same pitfalls as this year.
And one thing is certain, the next coaches of the Islanders and Golden Knights will not work in a climate of psychological safety. Because if Trotz and DeBoer are fired with results like this, their successors will know that the ejection seat button is not far from their boss’s hand.
Source: Radio-Canada
