The Puck Stops Here
Phoenix Finds A Coach
by PuckStopsHere on 09/25/09 at 10:58 PM ET
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The Phoenix Coyotes situation has dragged on way too long. They are all but guaranteed to spend the upcoming season competing for last place in the league as a result. I think the NHL should have either allowed the move to Hamilton long ago or contracted the team. It is awful to see the mess they created that seems to be getting continually worse.
One part of the mess was coaching. Wayne Gretzky was the Phoenix Coyote coach. He was also a minority owner of the team. He owned about 1.4% of the team when it went in to bankruptcy. This makes him insignificant in the ownership scheme of the team, but important in terms of lending his name to the franchise as a goodwill ambassador. For this role and his coaching job he was paid $8 million a year. That made him the highest paid coach in the NHL - if you ignore his other roles with the team (which make up some of his salary).
With the Coyotes bankruptcy, Gretzky’s future with the team was in jeopardy. It was not clear if he would still be around when the team finally emerged from bankruptcy. As a result, Wayne Gretzky stayed home from Phoenix Coyote training camp. This left the Coyotes as a coachless team in training camp and cemented their position as a poorly run team (they are not the only one - the Florida Panthers have gone into training camp with no general manager).
Wayne Gretzky had not been a great coach with Phoenix. In four years, he never managed to get his team in the playoffs. In the mess that is the Phoenix Coyotes, the lack of a top coach was yet another problem to deal with, but hardly the biggest problem.
Wayne Gretzky announced that he is stepping down as the Coyote coach. I think this decision had been planned for a while (at least if the Coyotes had a replacement coach). They hired their new coach Dave Tippett too quickly after Gretzky stepped down for it to have been a decision made after the Gretzky resignation. I think that means that Gretzky had offered to resign and was waiting until a new coach was in place to do so.
Dave Tippett is a good coach. He should do a better job that Gretzky would. He did a good job with the Dallas Stars, but was fired shortly after Joe Nieuwendyk took over in a move that looked as though Nieuwendyk wanted to do something bold to put his stamp on the team even if the bold move was a bad move. It is proof that Dave Tippett is regarded as a good coach that he was hired the same off-season he was fired. This is evidence that Dallas made a bad move getting rid of Tippett.
Phoenix is still a big mess. It will take far more than a competent coach to change that. Dave Tippett is a competent coach. His taking over is the first step in a new chapter in the franchise, which will hopefully have committed new ownership in this chapter as well (although that seems far less likely). Tippett should struggle to do anything with the Coyotes in their present circumstances. If he can keep them out of the lottery picks this year, he did a first rate job.
Filed in: | The Puck Stops Here | Permalink
Tags: Dave+Tippett, Phoenix+Coyotes, Wayne+Gretzky,
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