| ARTICLES |
| HIRED TO BE FIRED by Mike Brophy |
For Barry Melrose, it’s just another morning skate on the day of a game.
Nearly two years after his Los Angeles Kings took the NHL by storm, making it all the way to the Stanley Cup final
only to lose in five games to Patrick Roy and the Montreal Canadiens, his team is struggling.
But the flashy Melrose, who loves the spotlight and often looks like a cross between a Hollywood pimp and a
mobster with his long hair – remember, mullets were all the rage in 1995 – and black pinstripe suits, isn’t
worried. He knows his Kings will shake their funk. Besides, he has switched up his lines, changed goalies and
even altered the forechecking system. Now that’s coaching, baby.
Surely something’s gotta give. And it does.
When the skate ends, Melrose is summoned into the GM’s office. In no uncertain terms, Melrose hears the
words numerous NHL coaches hear every season: “You’re fired.”
There’s no Donald Trump pointing in his direction. No TV lights and cameras. And no future in the Kings
organization.
Just pack up your stuff and get the hell out of town.
“They call (assistant coach) Cap (Raeder) and I into the office and tell us we’re fired,” recalls Melrose, now a
successful NHL analyst on ESPN.
“We’ve got our sons – I think they were six and eight at the time – out on the ice and the kids are having the time
of their lives. Now we have to go down and tell the boys we’ve been fired. Both of them burst into tears. They’re
bawling their eyes out because just a few moments earlier their dads had the coolest jobs in the world,
coaching the Los Angeles Kings.”
And if you think the kids are upset, just wait until Melrose’s wife, Cindy, hears the news.
“I call her and tell her to bring the truck down to the rink because Cap and I drove in to work together,” Melrose
says. “His car won’t fit all our stuff in it. Cindy is a very fiery lady and by time she gets to the rink, she is hopping
mad. The (Edmonton) Oilers are on the ice for their skate and she starts yelling, ‘Go Oilers! I hope you kick their
asses tonight! The Kings suck!’ It was quite a scene.”
It’s a scene that many coaches and their families have been through. Perhaps the script was different, but the
end result was the same.
You know the old saying; coaches are hired to be fired. From the second a coach is hired, he is on the clock.
Tick…tick…tick…
Think about it, when was the last time an NHL coach retired of his own accord?
Scotty Bowman in 2002? Larry Robinson since retired from the Devils, but that was because the stress of the job
got to him. Others, such as Pat Burns (illness) and Darryl Sutter (remained as Flames GM) had other reasons
for leaving the bench. Rarely, though, does a coach say, “That’s it. I’ve had fun, but my time is up.”
Already this season, three coaches – Ken Hitchcock with the Flyers, Gerard Gallant with the Blue Jackets and
Trent Yawney with the Hawks – received pink slips. And others will follow. They always do.
It is not unusual for a half-dozen or so coaches to be fired each season. Last year, five bit the dust. In 2003-04, it
was seven; in the season before that, eight.
For most coaches, being fired is one of the most humiliating, embarrassing days of their lives. They love to
coach, so it’s like their reason for living has been taken away – or so it seems at the time.
“Nobody has any idea how devastating being fired is,” Hitchcock says. “It’s one thing to go through being fired,
but quite another to be fired publicly. The first thing you do is spend a lot of time blaming yourself. And the worst
feeling is knowing that in order to get back in, another coach is going to have to go through what you have just
gone through.”
And when a coach is fired, no matter how successful he has been throughout his career, he nearly always has a
sinking feeling in his gut that he’ll never be back. There are, after all, only 30 NHL head jobs up for grabs.
Pat Burns, who was coach of the year in 1989 with the Montreal Canadiens and in 1993 with the Toronto Maple
Leafs, once told The Hockey News that after he was fired by Boston in 2000-01, he became depressed thinking
he would never again have the chance to coach in the NHL. He went on to win a Stanley Cup with New Jersey.
Some coaches say their firing caught them completely by surprise. Others say they had an inkling their job was
on the line unless their team’s fortunes turned around in a hurry. Either way, being fired is a bitter pill to swallow.
A year after guiding the New York Rangers to the Eastern Conference semifinal, Colin Campbell’s team hit the
skids. Though he tried everything he could possibly think of, he couldn’t pull the club out of its funk and he was
dismissed.
“It’s just an awful feeling,” says Campbell, now senior vice-president of the NHL. “You want to win so badly. You
hole yourself up in your room and watch thousands of hours of videotape, trying to figure out how to turn things
around. You start to doubt everybody – your players, your assistant coaches, your (GM). Everybody thinks they
have the answer.
“You beat up guys at the end, trying to get the most out of them that you can. The last couple of days you sink
deeper and deeper. Then when it happens, it’s almost a relief. Not that you want to get fired, but the pressure is
so annoying.”
----------
Andy Murray says he had no illusions when he accepted the job as coach of the Kings in 1999. He knew there
would always be pressure on him to get the team in the playoffs, and though the Kings suffered through long
stretches with key players injured, Murray nearly always managed to keep them competitive. In the end, that
wasn’t enough and he was fired toward the end of last season.
“We battled our asses off every night,” Murray says. “The funny thing is, I had a feeling if we had made the
playoffs, we could have surprised a few teams.”
As it turned out, Edmonton got the eighth and final playoff spot in the Western Conference and went all the way to
Game 7 of the final. After watching the Oilers, Murray was left to wonder…what if?
“(GM) Dave Taylor and I talked all the time and there was no indication my job was in trouble,” Murray recalls. “I
mean, I knew we had to go on a tear to make the playoffs, but some of our best players (Alexander Frolov, Pavol
Demitra) were getting set to return from injury.
“I knew something was up when I got a call to report to Dave’s office at 5:30 in the afternoon. Dave was rarely still
in his office at that time and when he was, it was usually to tell a player he was being sent to the minors. I
walked into his office and said, ‘Dave, am I being sent to Manchester?’ ”
----------
Coaching in the NHL can take a toll on a man physically and emotionally. Just take a look at the pained
expression on Wayne Gretzky’s face behind the bench of the struggling Phoenix Coyotes. You think he’s having
fun?
“When you coach, you are never living in the moment,” Hitchcock says. “You are always living in the past or the
future. You can go to a movie with you’re family, but you aren’t paying attention to what’s on the screen. You are
either thinking about your team’s last game, or next game. Coaching is the reason why you drive down the
highway and right past your exit.”
Coaches become consumed with producing a winning formula.
“No matter how poorly your team is doing, you always think one win will lead to two, two wins will lead to four,”
Melrose says.
They’ll change the lines, bench the starting goalie, call players up from the minors, sit regulars on the end of the
bench, or worse, in the press box. They’ll skate their players into the ice or, conversely, give them extra days off.
“When things are going badly, all you’re doing is looking for 60 minutes of good hockey out of your team,” says
Ottawa pro scout and goalie coach Ron Low, who coached the Oilers and Rangers. “Not 45 minutes or 50
minutes…60 good minutes.”
Adds Hitchcock: “It’s not the pressure that gets to you. Coaching is all about feeling like you are in control of the
way the players are playing. When you lose on an ongoing basis, you start to feel like the players aren’t playing
the way you want them to. You don’t want to turn them into robots, but you want them to play a certain way in
order to win.”
It can bring the strongest men to their knees.
“You hear about coaches who don’t eat well and don’t sleep well,” says Atlanta coach Bob Hartley, who was fired
by the Colorado Avalanche in 2002. “You hear about coaches watching video at crazy times of the night, looking
for answers.”
Mike Keenan, who has coached just about every team in the NHL at one time or another, says coaches have too
much on their minds to dwell on being fired.
“You are too busy doing the things you need to do to prepare your team for its next game to worry about your job
security,” says Keenan, who guided the Rangers to the Cup in 1994. “When you have been a successful coach,
you really don’t expect to be fired.”
For some, perhaps, but not all. Steve Stirling, fired late last season by the Islanders, knew he was in trouble
when his team dropped 10 of 13 games.
“When the team is losing you know it is either going to change players, coaches or (GMs),” Stirling says. “We
were playing well and we were in every game, but we always found a way to shoot ourselves in the foot late in
games. When that happens, you know a change is coming.”
----------
It was around Christmas time when Bob Hartley – who had led the Avs to the Cup a year-and-a-half earlier – was
making plans to visit a local children’s hospital to spread a little cheer.
“We had just finished our team lunch and I was informed there was a coach’s meeting,” Hartley says. “When we
got there, the assistant coaches were told to leave the room so (GM Pierre) Lacroix could speak with me. Pierre
simply said, ‘It’s over.’ That was it.
“Instead of going to visit kids in the hospital, I was going to the funeral home.”
Hartley says he spent the next few days in a fog.
“I woke up the next day and sat on the edge of my bed thinking to myself, ‘Was I just dreaming? Did I really get
fired, or was it just a dream?’ ” Hartley says. “I had to actually convince myself that I didn’t have a job to go to
anymore.”
Fortunately for Hartley, he was out of work only a few weeks. He was hired to coach Atlanta Jan. 14.
Toronto coach Paul Maurice likes to joke that when he was hired by the owner of the Carolina Hurricanes
organization, then the Hartford Whalers, he was promised it would be a job for life.
“Eighteen years later, they fire me,” Maurice deadpans. “Where’s the loyalty?”
Actually, Maurice had a long run with the Whalers and Hurricanes and looks back fondly on his experience.
“I had a great situation,” he says. “The GM (Jim Rutherford) was my best friend. We had an agreement that he
would support me right up until the last day and when the time comes, he would call me into his office and say,
‘We’re going to make a change.’ So when the day came, we shook hands and that was it. We went out for lunch
the following week and I’d say now we’re closer friends than ever.”
Maurice says the Hurricanes were actually playing well at the time of his dismissal, but they were snake-bitten
and couldn’t score. He says the fact he and Rutherford were so close helped tip him off about his future.
“You know, when your best friend is the GM and his secretary calls you in for a 10 a.m. meeting, it’s usually not a
good thing,” Maurice says. “Actually, in retrospect, it was kind of funny.”
Very few coaches laugh when they get canned.
Pierre McGuire thought he was making progress behind the bench of the Whalers, but when the team’s
ownership changed hands, he was let go.
McGuire admits he monitored the success of the team the following season.
“Don’t let guys B.S. you, they look to see how their old team did,” says McGuire, now a successful media
personality. “If they start winning, then you think maybe the right choice was made. But you don’t always want to
see them start winning.”
----------
Peter Laviolette guided the Carolina Hurricanes to the Stanley Cup championship last season and says he
hopes he works the next 30 years with the team before retiring. But he’s not counting on it.
“If I were to get fired tomorrow, I would never be caught off-guard,” says Laviolette, who was fired by the Islanders
after the 2002-03 season.
“I have accepted the notion that one day, I will likely be fired and I’ll have to move. It’s part of the job, knowing one
day you will be terminated.”
Nearly two years after his Los Angeles Kings took the NHL by storm, making it all the way to the Stanley Cup final
only to lose in five games to Patrick Roy and the Montreal Canadiens, his team is struggling.
But the flashy Melrose, who loves the spotlight and often looks like a cross between a Hollywood pimp and a
mobster with his long hair – remember, mullets were all the rage in 1995 – and black pinstripe suits, isn’t
worried. He knows his Kings will shake their funk. Besides, he has switched up his lines, changed goalies and
even altered the forechecking system. Now that’s coaching, baby.
Surely something’s gotta give. And it does.
When the skate ends, Melrose is summoned into the GM’s office. In no uncertain terms, Melrose hears the
words numerous NHL coaches hear every season: “You’re fired.”
There’s no Donald Trump pointing in his direction. No TV lights and cameras. And no future in the Kings
organization.
Just pack up your stuff and get the hell out of town.
“They call (assistant coach) Cap (Raeder) and I into the office and tell us we’re fired,” recalls Melrose, now a
successful NHL analyst on ESPN.
“We’ve got our sons – I think they were six and eight at the time – out on the ice and the kids are having the time
of their lives. Now we have to go down and tell the boys we’ve been fired. Both of them burst into tears. They’re
bawling their eyes out because just a few moments earlier their dads had the coolest jobs in the world,
coaching the Los Angeles Kings.”
And if you think the kids are upset, just wait until Melrose’s wife, Cindy, hears the news.
“I call her and tell her to bring the truck down to the rink because Cap and I drove in to work together,” Melrose
says. “His car won’t fit all our stuff in it. Cindy is a very fiery lady and by time she gets to the rink, she is hopping
mad. The (Edmonton) Oilers are on the ice for their skate and she starts yelling, ‘Go Oilers! I hope you kick their
asses tonight! The Kings suck!’ It was quite a scene.”
It’s a scene that many coaches and their families have been through. Perhaps the script was different, but the
end result was the same.
You know the old saying; coaches are hired to be fired. From the second a coach is hired, he is on the clock.
Tick…tick…tick…
Think about it, when was the last time an NHL coach retired of his own accord?
Scotty Bowman in 2002? Larry Robinson since retired from the Devils, but that was because the stress of the job
got to him. Others, such as Pat Burns (illness) and Darryl Sutter (remained as Flames GM) had other reasons
for leaving the bench. Rarely, though, does a coach say, “That’s it. I’ve had fun, but my time is up.”
Already this season, three coaches – Ken Hitchcock with the Flyers, Gerard Gallant with the Blue Jackets and
Trent Yawney with the Hawks – received pink slips. And others will follow. They always do.
It is not unusual for a half-dozen or so coaches to be fired each season. Last year, five bit the dust. In 2003-04, it
was seven; in the season before that, eight.
For most coaches, being fired is one of the most humiliating, embarrassing days of their lives. They love to
coach, so it’s like their reason for living has been taken away – or so it seems at the time.
“Nobody has any idea how devastating being fired is,” Hitchcock says. “It’s one thing to go through being fired,
but quite another to be fired publicly. The first thing you do is spend a lot of time blaming yourself. And the worst
feeling is knowing that in order to get back in, another coach is going to have to go through what you have just
gone through.”
And when a coach is fired, no matter how successful he has been throughout his career, he nearly always has a
sinking feeling in his gut that he’ll never be back. There are, after all, only 30 NHL head jobs up for grabs.
Pat Burns, who was coach of the year in 1989 with the Montreal Canadiens and in 1993 with the Toronto Maple
Leafs, once told The Hockey News that after he was fired by Boston in 2000-01, he became depressed thinking
he would never again have the chance to coach in the NHL. He went on to win a Stanley Cup with New Jersey.
Some coaches say their firing caught them completely by surprise. Others say they had an inkling their job was
on the line unless their team’s fortunes turned around in a hurry. Either way, being fired is a bitter pill to swallow.
A year after guiding the New York Rangers to the Eastern Conference semifinal, Colin Campbell’s team hit the
skids. Though he tried everything he could possibly think of, he couldn’t pull the club out of its funk and he was
dismissed.
“It’s just an awful feeling,” says Campbell, now senior vice-president of the NHL. “You want to win so badly. You
hole yourself up in your room and watch thousands of hours of videotape, trying to figure out how to turn things
around. You start to doubt everybody – your players, your assistant coaches, your (GM). Everybody thinks they
have the answer.
“You beat up guys at the end, trying to get the most out of them that you can. The last couple of days you sink
deeper and deeper. Then when it happens, it’s almost a relief. Not that you want to get fired, but the pressure is
so annoying.”
----------
Andy Murray says he had no illusions when he accepted the job as coach of the Kings in 1999. He knew there
would always be pressure on him to get the team in the playoffs, and though the Kings suffered through long
stretches with key players injured, Murray nearly always managed to keep them competitive. In the end, that
wasn’t enough and he was fired toward the end of last season.
“We battled our asses off every night,” Murray says. “The funny thing is, I had a feeling if we had made the
playoffs, we could have surprised a few teams.”
As it turned out, Edmonton got the eighth and final playoff spot in the Western Conference and went all the way to
Game 7 of the final. After watching the Oilers, Murray was left to wonder…what if?
“(GM) Dave Taylor and I talked all the time and there was no indication my job was in trouble,” Murray recalls. “I
mean, I knew we had to go on a tear to make the playoffs, but some of our best players (Alexander Frolov, Pavol
Demitra) were getting set to return from injury.
“I knew something was up when I got a call to report to Dave’s office at 5:30 in the afternoon. Dave was rarely still
in his office at that time and when he was, it was usually to tell a player he was being sent to the minors. I
walked into his office and said, ‘Dave, am I being sent to Manchester?’ ”
----------
Coaching in the NHL can take a toll on a man physically and emotionally. Just take a look at the pained
expression on Wayne Gretzky’s face behind the bench of the struggling Phoenix Coyotes. You think he’s having
fun?
“When you coach, you are never living in the moment,” Hitchcock says. “You are always living in the past or the
future. You can go to a movie with you’re family, but you aren’t paying attention to what’s on the screen. You are
either thinking about your team’s last game, or next game. Coaching is the reason why you drive down the
highway and right past your exit.”
Coaches become consumed with producing a winning formula.
“No matter how poorly your team is doing, you always think one win will lead to two, two wins will lead to four,”
Melrose says.
They’ll change the lines, bench the starting goalie, call players up from the minors, sit regulars on the end of the
bench, or worse, in the press box. They’ll skate their players into the ice or, conversely, give them extra days off.
“When things are going badly, all you’re doing is looking for 60 minutes of good hockey out of your team,” says
Ottawa pro scout and goalie coach Ron Low, who coached the Oilers and Rangers. “Not 45 minutes or 50
minutes…60 good minutes.”
Adds Hitchcock: “It’s not the pressure that gets to you. Coaching is all about feeling like you are in control of the
way the players are playing. When you lose on an ongoing basis, you start to feel like the players aren’t playing
the way you want them to. You don’t want to turn them into robots, but you want them to play a certain way in
order to win.”
It can bring the strongest men to their knees.
“You hear about coaches who don’t eat well and don’t sleep well,” says Atlanta coach Bob Hartley, who was fired
by the Colorado Avalanche in 2002. “You hear about coaches watching video at crazy times of the night, looking
for answers.”
Mike Keenan, who has coached just about every team in the NHL at one time or another, says coaches have too
much on their minds to dwell on being fired.
“You are too busy doing the things you need to do to prepare your team for its next game to worry about your job
security,” says Keenan, who guided the Rangers to the Cup in 1994. “When you have been a successful coach,
you really don’t expect to be fired.”
For some, perhaps, but not all. Steve Stirling, fired late last season by the Islanders, knew he was in trouble
when his team dropped 10 of 13 games.
“When the team is losing you know it is either going to change players, coaches or (GMs),” Stirling says. “We
were playing well and we were in every game, but we always found a way to shoot ourselves in the foot late in
games. When that happens, you know a change is coming.”
----------
It was around Christmas time when Bob Hartley – who had led the Avs to the Cup a year-and-a-half earlier – was
making plans to visit a local children’s hospital to spread a little cheer.
“We had just finished our team lunch and I was informed there was a coach’s meeting,” Hartley says. “When we
got there, the assistant coaches were told to leave the room so (GM Pierre) Lacroix could speak with me. Pierre
simply said, ‘It’s over.’ That was it.
“Instead of going to visit kids in the hospital, I was going to the funeral home.”
Hartley says he spent the next few days in a fog.
“I woke up the next day and sat on the edge of my bed thinking to myself, ‘Was I just dreaming? Did I really get
fired, or was it just a dream?’ ” Hartley says. “I had to actually convince myself that I didn’t have a job to go to
anymore.”
Fortunately for Hartley, he was out of work only a few weeks. He was hired to coach Atlanta Jan. 14.
Toronto coach Paul Maurice likes to joke that when he was hired by the owner of the Carolina Hurricanes
organization, then the Hartford Whalers, he was promised it would be a job for life.
“Eighteen years later, they fire me,” Maurice deadpans. “Where’s the loyalty?”
Actually, Maurice had a long run with the Whalers and Hurricanes and looks back fondly on his experience.
“I had a great situation,” he says. “The GM (Jim Rutherford) was my best friend. We had an agreement that he
would support me right up until the last day and when the time comes, he would call me into his office and say,
‘We’re going to make a change.’ So when the day came, we shook hands and that was it. We went out for lunch
the following week and I’d say now we’re closer friends than ever.”
Maurice says the Hurricanes were actually playing well at the time of his dismissal, but they were snake-bitten
and couldn’t score. He says the fact he and Rutherford were so close helped tip him off about his future.
“You know, when your best friend is the GM and his secretary calls you in for a 10 a.m. meeting, it’s usually not a
good thing,” Maurice says. “Actually, in retrospect, it was kind of funny.”
Very few coaches laugh when they get canned.
Pierre McGuire thought he was making progress behind the bench of the Whalers, but when the team’s
ownership changed hands, he was let go.
McGuire admits he monitored the success of the team the following season.
“Don’t let guys B.S. you, they look to see how their old team did,” says McGuire, now a successful media
personality. “If they start winning, then you think maybe the right choice was made. But you don’t always want to
see them start winning.”
----------
Peter Laviolette guided the Carolina Hurricanes to the Stanley Cup championship last season and says he
hopes he works the next 30 years with the team before retiring. But he’s not counting on it.
“If I were to get fired tomorrow, I would never be caught off-guard,” says Laviolette, who was fired by the Islanders
after the 2002-03 season.
“I have accepted the notion that one day, I will likely be fired and I’ll have to move. It’s part of the job, knowing one
day you will be terminated.”