The Florida Panthers Fire Their Coaching Staff

Well, you kinda knew this was coming.

I’m sure even those men with their heads on the proverbial chopping block half-expected that their tenure in Sunrise, FL would end in this manner. Two years after winning the Southeast Division title, the Florida Panthers have disintegrated to become the worst team in the League. When your team excels at being awful – they came out of the gate lame, 3-9-4, and now working on an epically bad seven-game losing streak – it doesn’t take a blind man to see that change is necessary.

Quite often, a head coach is fired and their bright young assistant (sometimes a coach who’s come through the team’s minor ranks, by way of the American Hockey League and/or the East Coast Hockey League) quietly takes over for the rest of the season…and is often given the permanent job thereafter. It’s a good tester to see if a potential head coach has what it takes to do the job and compete in the toughest hockey competition in the world.

Obviously, that course of action wasn’t enough for the powers-that-be at the Panthers, who’ve swung the axe in a major way, relieving head coach Kevin Dineen of his duties, and also terminating assistants Gord Murphy and Craig Ramsay. GM Dale Tallon promised that there would be more changes forthcoming. Veteran defenseman Ryan Whitney, a healthy scratch for most of this season, has already been placed on waivers. You get the feeling there’ll be more moves made as the Panthers navigate the month of November.

And it’s not hard to see why. Fresh off being the worst team in the lockout-shortened season, this seven-game losing streak was the proverbial straw to break the camel’s back, and, for mine, a long time coming. The Panthers, despite having some pretty good young talent on their team – 2012-13 NHL Rookie of the Year Jonathan Huberdeau chief amongst them – are mired at the bottom of the League and had shown no signs under the just-fired coaching staff of lifting themselves any higher.

The worst thing about having great talent and a bad coaching staff is that brilliant players are underdeveloped and they tend to not reach their full potential – i.e. the potential the Panthers front office doubtless saw when scouting the likes of Huberdeau, 2013 first round pick Aleksander Barkov and young defenseman Dmitry Kulikov (in his fifth season, but still only twenty-three years old). 

Clearly, Tallon decided that enough was enough. He hadn’t seen the requisite improvement of these young kids, and so pulled the trigger. The clean-out is on in Sunrise, and coming into the organisation – an unenviable position at the moment – is AHL veteran coach Peter Horachek, who, of course, has been slapped with the ‘interim’ tag, for which he may be glad. Florida has given up the second-most goals this year (after giving up the most last year) because they only have two defensemen with a plus rating. I don’t care which way you look at it, that’s flat-out bad.

The situation in net is even worse. Their goalie hope, 39-year-old Tim Thomas, is nursing his second injury of the young season, which isn’t that hard to diagnose: I mean, the man is at the back end of his professional hockey life, and he came into the team having sat out a year, which is a killer at that age. With Thomas out, young goalie Jacob Markstrom is a guy in a shooting gallery, getting absolutely nothing from his defence. No wonder the twenty-three-year-old is getting lit up like a pinball machine. It must be murder on his self-confidence.

It will be interesting to see what the new coaches can do with Markstrom and the goalie situation. Get some good, solid defensive players, would be a good start. Manage the youngsters better, a close second. They’ve relied too much on the kids this season, and it’s tough to put such responsibility on guys who’re barely old enough to shave, and who aren’t established pros yet. It’s almost unfair. 

Huberdeau, who was a gold-plated prospect coming out of juniors, and who shone on the world stage at the IIHF Juniors, and others, like Nick Bjugstad, the towering former Minnesota Golden Gopher, who’s as talented a player as there was in last year’s draft, would have been sent to the AHL for a conditioning stint, and to get used to pro hockey and it’s nuances, which are markedly different from either Canadian Major Junior or NCAA competition in America. Players need time to adjust, to find their feet, and to progress. It’s a career-staller to stick them right into the NHL, unless they’re a guy with the can’t-miss talent of, say, Ryan Nugent-Hopkins or Sidney Crosby.

Horachek needs an injection of veteran talent as soon as possible. He needs to make moves at or before the trade deadline. The Panthers barely have a player on their roster whom you might call elite – veteran defenseman Brian Campbell is probably about the only one to whom I’d assign that tag – and instead are relying on journeymen and guys who’ve had one good season, are paid stupid money by another club as a result…and can never live up to that one big year. I’ve never understood that process.

Changes are obviously afoot, but is it all too late? The problem with being a non-traditional hocket market, as Florida obviously is, is that you need wins and championships to survive. Get those bandwagon fans going with some wins and good players, and you put butts on seats, which has been a problem down in Florida for a long time. A seven-game losing streak, no offense and no defense isn’t the way to win the hearts and the minds of the fans. 

Horachek has a lot of work to do, and not much time in which to do it.

Dropping the Gloves - Why the NHL Needs Fighting

My opinion piece on the hot-button topic in hockey today, originally posted at US Sports Down Under.

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Far beyond the business of changing a game's momentum, fighting plays a role in the NHL, and it should continue. Here's why:

Chances are, if you’re anything more than just a casual hockey fan, you have a strong opinion of the role that fighting plays in the game. There’s very little time for middle ground in this struggle – both from fans, players, administrators and the media – which makes the concept of fighting the most polarising issue in the sport today. You either like it, or you don’t. 

I am a fan of it, at least to a point.

Let me explain: there is a definite place for fighting as a form of deterrent in the game. What I don’t agree with is the ridiculous scraps you often see from a face-off, and particularly an opening face-off, between players who don’t have any particular carryover problem with the guy they’re dropping the mitts to attempt to pound. That looks silly, and it gives hockey a bad name. I’ve lost track of how many times people have said to me that hockey’s just a game of brawls, interspersed by fans rioting when they lose Game Sevens on home ice.

Yet, despite the negative image this country has of the greatest sport on earth, fighting plays an important role in the game that we true fans love. We all complain about thug acts that seem to pop up once or twice a season to enrage the general fan base. For example, Matt Cooke, the noted agitator who made a bad name for himself as a Penguin, was famous (before his supposed rehabilitation) for being one of the dirtiest guys on the ice, the King of the Cheap Shot. He’s arguably responsible for ending the glittering career of former Boston star Marc Savard. All of his indiscretions – and it’s a long list – have, in some way or another, come under on-ice scrutiny from opposition players, in the form of a flurry of lefts and rights.

As an aside, it’s often the case that the dirtiest players are the worst fighters. Nevertheless, guys of Cooke’s ilk are made to pay for their actions. There are consequences. One of the most immediate ones is the likelihood of having your face rearranged by a guy who’s a fringe player in terms of stick handling and shooting the puck, but has amassed a considerable resume of fights.

The reason we don’t see many more guys like Cooke – or a pair in Buffalo: Steve Ott, who has somehow managed to have a ‘C’ stitched onto his jersey for this season, or John Scott whose cowardly shot at Phil Kessel was derided around the league – playing dirty in the NHL on a nightly basis is because of the knowledge that there are monsters of men in the opposition line-up whom a coach would dispatch to the ice the very shift after an indiscretion has been committed.

That guy, the Colton Orr or George Parros of the team, is out there for one reason: to exact a sort of revenge. More often than not, it happens soon after, or in the next game between the two adversaries. But, without fail, it happens. Hockey players, almost to a man, have long memories, particularly when it comes to dirty or at least questionable play.

It’s an unwritten rule: do something dirty out on the ice, and retribution is coming. It’s a part of the Gentleman’s Code that’s been upheld (by most, but not all) for twenty or thirty years, and I firmly believe that the small amount of questionable plays from the Matt Cooke’s of the National Hockey League is as a direct result of the presence of fighting in the game.

Consider, for a moment, what the National Hockey League would look like if fighting was banned. Ask yourself just how many players out there currently consider laying a late hit, a high hit, or using their stick as a cleaver or something else along those lines, but decide not to follow through because they don’t want to come up against the opposition’s fourth line brawler and risk an injury and an extended time watching their team from the stands. Probably quite a few.

I’m telling you: take that pretty convincing deterrent for thuggery out of the game, and you’ll open the floodgates. There’ll be fleet of goons out on the ice, ones who make Cooke, Ott and Scott seem fairly tame – remember those guys the Islanders brought into their team for that brawl-filled game against the Islanders a few years back? – in comparison, ending the careers of promising superstars who find themselves at the mercy of some of their peers who don’t mind treading a dark line.

Why do you suppose Gretzky rarely took the ice without enforcers on either side during his glittering career? The same can be said for Sidney Crosby in Pittsburgh at the moment.
Does the NHL want to risk losing it’s best players to injury, caused by a two-bit thug on a contract that, as far as professional sport in America goes, is well below the poverty line?

It’s bad enough for the League’s coffers that Crosby’s missed so much time. Imagine if Rick Nash, Claude Giroux, Jonathan Toews, Anze Kopitar, Ryan Nugent-Hopkins and Patrice Bergeron, to name just a few, joined him? All as a result of thugs having their way on the ice – and all because the NHL took away the one deterrent that might’ve given some of these guys pause?

Don’t get me wrong, hockey is a violent game – we all know that, and understand that and love it for the continual confrontations between solid men, but even in a violent sport, there are still limits to be upheld. And if those limits are breached, there must be some sort of physical punishment forthcoming. With fighting, the game is self-regulated. Without it, the NHL’s disciplinary people are going to need to expand to handle the sheer weight of work they’ll be asked to do.

Aside from the Gentleman’s Code and fighting acting as a deterrent, the one indisputable fact of the matter is that there’s very few things more exciting in the world of sport than nineteen or twenty thousand people on their feet and cheering like crazy when a fight happens. It puts butts in seats and separates the NHL from every other professional league in North America. It’s why the League, who has made adjustments over the years – instigator penalties, suspensions for leaving the bench, and the new rule where two minutes are tacked on for players removing their helmets before the fight – will never completely ban it.

And nor should they, if the game is to stay as relatively clean as it is now.