Posts Tagged ‘Darryl Sutter’
Iain MacIntyre, in the midst of the revisionists’ accounts of what happened the last two seasons in Calgary, hits the nail on the head with his post at The Sporting News. When Sutter was asked, a couple of years ago, why he brought Keenan to Calgary, Sutter basically scoffed at the question and quipped that all he wanted to know is if Keenan still wanted to coach.
But in May, Darryl fired Keenan after another first-round playoff flop. He then hired little brother Brent, who bolted from New Jersey for the chance to coach closer to his cattle ranch 90 minutes north of Calgary.
The most remarkable thing Darryl Sutter achieved with Keenan was transforming a coaching pariah into a sympathetic figure.
It wasn’t Keenan who had mismanaged the Flames’ salary cap to the point that a spate of late-season injuries, financial restrictions and a 3-6-0 finish cost the team first place in the Northwest.
Sutter has a far better, and much deeper team to work with this time around. He has four legitimate top-four defensemen, Olli Jokinen for an entire season, and more of the grit that Keenan loves in guys like Nigel Dawes. Still, this is the beginning of the end for the Sutters. When you hire your brother, there are generally only two ways out: you both quit, or you both are fired. My personal hunch is that Keenan will be redeemed by the results of this brotherly situation.
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I’m calling B.S. Maybe the media won’t, but they are populist, anyway. Keep in mind that shortly after the Flames burned out in the first round of the playoffs (one could say they burned out toward the end of the regular season, when they were befallen to injury), it was the fans who were the voice of reason. It was the fans that pointed out that Darryl Sutter was the real issue here, putting his team behind the 8-ball when it came to the salary cap. It was Darryl Sutter grabbing another high-priced forward at the deadline instead of shoring up the defense he so loves to complain about well after the fact. It was Darryl Sutter who ignored that he had an entirely unproven backup goaltender on an otherwise (as he believes) Stanley Cup caliber hockey club, yet it’s the same Darryl Sutter who is now complaining that Mikka Kiprusoff played too much (as if Darryl couldn’t have made a “suggestion” to the coach for whom he was the boss). The fans — yes, the fans have been the ones to point this out. All the while the media simply worked and worked and worked at getting Mike Keenan fired. It didn’t work…
…that is until, AHA, very convenient, Brent Sutter went waaaaaaaaaa, waaaaaaaaaaa, crying like a baby and saying he was homesick and missed his family. Then all of a sudden Keenan (who Darryl was quoted as saying only a year previous, “Mike’s an elite coach. There are only a handful of them in the league. Mike’s not going anywhere”) was expendable as a guy who “didn’t get enough” from his star players, played Kiprusoff “way too much,” and didn’t bring about a “defensive philosophy” (when in the world has Mike Keenan ever been the defensive answer to a team’s woes??????).
Darryl and Brent are both full of, quite frankly, B.S. Yes, with a capital “B” and a capital “S.” This had nothing to do with Mike Keenan, and everything to do with a) deflecting the blame that Darryl was getting from the fans, yet the media had overlooked to that point and b) a chance to take one last crack at this Flames experiment with their brother. I can only hope that Calgary will be decimated with injuries come playoff time again so that Darryl can make excuses for his brother. I can only hope that their lack of a backup goalie kills them so that Kiprusoff has to play the last 40 games just to try to slip into the playoffs. I can only hope they try to tackle the upcoming season with the poor defensive corps they had (other than Regehr and Phaneuf) so that Darryl and Brent can scratch their heads at their golden defensive philosophy gone wrong. Lastly, I can only hope that some other team realizes the job Keenan did in Calgary and gives him another chance. Surely it’ll be someone who realizes that Keenan is not known for his sytematic teaching of the game, nor for his innovative defensive philosophy, but because he’s a winner and because even though the media likes to hint otherwise, just about every one of Keenan’s stops has been as successful or moreso than the person he succeeded as well as the one who succeeded him.
Something stinks…and I know it’s the Sutter brothers and their B.S.
Update: The Bleacher Report is as cynical as I am.
Keep in mind that the Devils’ season ended on April 28th. It took Brent over 40 days to consider his resignation, but only three to jump back in. His deliberation reached a relatively quick end when Mike Keenan was fired on May 23rd.
The dates just don’t add up. He took a very long time to decide about his future (understandable, even though it put the Devils in a very difficult position right before the draft and free agency), then reconsidered only three days later.
Update 2: I am not always a huge fan of Scott Burnside, but I give him credit for being one of the few mainstreamers who gets it:
Last time we checked, the Flames had to play 82 regular-season games, the same as Brent’s old team, the New Jersey Devils. And last time we checked, half of the Flames’ games were on the road, the same number of games away from home as the Devils. And last time we checked our trusty map (not to mention calling colleagues in Calgary), Red Deer, where Brent farms and owns a much-loved junior team, is still about a 90-minute drive from Calgary.
All of which makes us more than a little suspicious of Brent’s motives given that the main reason he waffled on returning to coach the Devils in 2009-10 was that he missed being home and looking after his junior team.
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Jonathan Willis points out that even if Kiprusoff had just been average, Keenan would not have been fireable.
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Roughly one year ago…
General manager Darryl Sutter, who coached the team to the Stanley Cup final in 2004, did not second-guess Keenan’s decision to give Kiprusoff the hook.
“He’s an elite coach and there’s only a handful of them,” Sutter said. “He’s our coach absolutely.”
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If you listened to the presser today, here’s what Sutter said about Keenan:
-He had two good regular seasons
-They did well in last year’s playoffs to hang with San Jose
-The decision to fire him was not based on this year’s playoff performance
Um…so what was it based on? Sutter getting bored?
It was very strange — listen to the press conference if you get a chance (I’m sure Fan960 will podcast it and flames.nhl.com will make it available for streaming).
Update: Here’s the link to the afternoon press conference.
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Mike Keenan was finally fired yesterday, and the popular opinion seems to place no more than half of the blame on the former Flames coach. Keenan was dealt the difficult hand of finishing off the season with less than a full roster, incurring many injuries in the process, and playing out a playoff schedule without his top defenseman, a couple other of his top 6, and a goalie who didn’t get much rest due to the attempt to secure the 3-seed in the West (which they would have handily won with a full complement of players). What does this mean? In terms of Sutter, it means that he’s going to have to start using a mirror.
What this dismissal does is heap even more scrutiny on Darryl Sutter and his blueprint. He recycled Keenan, an old-school cage-rattler who hadn’t won a playoff round since 1996, to the astonishment of many. He assembled this group; built it in his image. He’s told everyone, again and again, that it was fully capable of a long spring run.
And yet, here they are, facing a fourth coaching change in the past five seasons.
For the Calgary Flames, it all depends on who comes in next. One thing you know for certain when you play a Mike Keenan team — it ain’t going to be easy. In a division like the Northwest, you better be ready to hire someone in that mold or you’ll find yourself in the same place as Tony Granato’s Colorado Avalanche (with a team posessing nearly as much talent as any other team in the division).
For Mike Keenan, I think he will get another shot if he wants to do this. It may not be for several years, but he did his image a favor in Calgary. He managed to keep the peace in the locker room, he won the favor of his important veterans (even Kiprusoff), and he only resorted to the most challenging tactics at critical times…and they typically were successful.
The loss, last year, to San Jose in the 7-game series was a case of Keenan’s team playing way above their talent level. This year they had the talent on the roster to win the Cup, but much of that talent was laid up in the trainer’s room. Much of that talent fell out of contention when Sutter put the club in a poor position of suiting up 15 players at the end of the year, a time when you want to roll four lines and get everyone in playoff shape.
This wasn’t a coaching problem. This wasn’t exactly a popular move made for the fans. This was likely a last-ditch effort for Darryl Sutter to bring another brother into the Calgary mix before he is smoked out of town. That smoke seems to be rising by the day.
Update: Sutter’s predecessor says Sutter deserves plenty of the blame:
“With this core of players, they have flamed out in the playoffs four consecutive years in the first round. I would suggest some of the issues they are facing are not going to go away with the coach.
I think (Keenan is being asked to take) full responsibility where he doesn’t deserve full responsibility.”
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After one long day of media interviews, Darryl Sutter had answered few questions. And now, a few weeks later, we are still left wondering what the evaluations of the players and staff revealed. My hunch is that Keenan will be back. I don’t know about the rest of the staff — I’d say some will return while a few of the prominent ones will not (ie. Playfair and Preston). Personally, I believe that is what should happen. I’d extend Keenan for another year or two and give him two-three years with a staff he has some input on. If he fails with that, he deserves to be canned.
What do you think is going to happen?
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Eric Francis, today, in the Calgary Sun:
Young blood is needed behind the bench and in the locker-room, which is exactly the way it’s going to be as Sutter claims he’s re-stocked the shelves.
Although the injuries cut deep into the Flames lineup, they are not an excuse as this club had been mercifully spared of notable ailments the previous three seasons with the same result.
In case Mr. Francis doesn’t realize it, Keenan has only been the coach for two years. He certainly can’t be held accountable for the Flames failures for the last four (though I’m sure, at times, two years can seem like four when you have someone that competitive involved).
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The Calgary Flames had a team with no business losing in the first round. That’s not taking anything away from Chicago, who played a great series. Still, the Flames geared up roster-wise for this series and expected more.
Let’s keep in mind that Iginla forgot to show up for most of the series. Jokinen showed one game of solid effort. Kiprusoff was his usually horrible self come April.
Let’s also keep in mind that the Flames were without their top defenseman, Robyn Regehr, and Dion Phaneuf for the final game.
Still, when all is said and done, the coach often (unfairly) takes the blame for these kinds of series. And, it’s not like a person can completely ignore the way the season went. After a rough start, the team completely re-tooled their defensive game and went on an amazing tear where they seemed to win the division early in the game. Except, they peaked too early and never regained that consistency they once had. Maybe that is a coach’s problem, I’m not sure.
If I had to put a few fingers on what happened in this series I would point to a few things that really were to blame for series loss for the Flames:
- First and foremost, take away any team’s best defenseman and their chances decrease to almost none. Think about if Boston lost Chara, if the Wings lost Lidstrom, or if Anaheim lost Pronger. All three teams would have trouble winning a playoff series without that guy, and all three are very good teams.
- There were a lot of other injuries that played a key role. All teams are playing hurt this time of year, but when you lose your top two centermen in the same game, lose a 20-goal scorer for a game and a half, and lose your 2nd best defenseman for a critical game 6, you are playing without a very realistic chance. Sure, Keenan and the boys put on a good face and didn’t cry victim, but the post-mortem should show that this was the case.
- Kiprusoff was terrible again. I know people will like to point to some of the goals and say that he didn’t have a chance, but the teams that win have goalies that stop those kinds of shots in games where they’ve only allowed 12-13 shots over the first two periods. They just do, and Kiprusoff has not proven to be a big-game goalie. He had one good, seemingly lucky post-season and many of the first-round exits of late can be blamed mostly on him.
- Jokinen did not live up to the playoff expectations, and Iginla has lost a step. The former might have been expected, but the latter is disappointing. Actually, this wasn’t just evident in the post-season. Iginla is a half-step slow on everything he used to be able to do. Rarely does he get a good, clean wrister to the net. It always seems that a guy at least gets a deflection out of play on every shot Iginla takes. Only a bad bounce seems to find Iginla in a scoring opportunity. I know people focus on Iginla, but they always have. He simply doesn’t have what it takes to beat that anymore. Other guys that are the focus of the opposing team get theirs. Iginla just doesn’t have that anymore.
- The Flames were tired. They played much of the last two weeks short on players because they couldn’t afford to field a full roster and stay under the cap. That’s a huge disadvantage, not only in terms of wins and losses at the end of the year (and it ultimately cost them the division and an easier first round series against the Blues), but it also caused a lot of extra wear and tear on the Flames best players just before the playoffs.
It’s likely that Keenan will be the fall guy and very quickly. I don’t think he should be, but reality says that this is what happens when a team can’t seem to get over the hump. If Darryl Sutter is smart and calculated, however, he’ll realize that there were a lot of circumstances that were far more to blame than a coach who managed a competitive series while having to play the likes of Warrent Peters and Anders Eriksson (Eriksson’s first action of the entire season coming in the post-season).
It’s unfortunate. My interest in the NHL playoff took a serious hit this evening.
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The Globe and Mail has a fascinating article about Mike Keenan today. In it:
“He still loves to win, probably more than any coach that I’ve ever played for,” Conroy said. “Sometimes a coach will say after a game, ‘Yeah, you won, but you didn’t play all that well and didn’t deserve to.’ Mike is not like that. He is a bottom-line guy. If you won, you won. And if you lose, well, it’s not a lot of fun around here.”
No wonder I can identify with the man. We need more Mike Keenan’s in the world.
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