With the Oilers bringing on Pat Quinn and Tom Renney, Edmonton now has a coaching staff that rivals the NHL's best.
EDMONTON —If you looked at the Edmonton Oilers Tuesday morning and assessed that — new coaches or not — they are not a Stanley Cup contender, you’d get no argument here.
But if you ever thought that this was a team vulnerable to being outcoached, or you wondered whether a new set of opinions was required to raise the compete level of a soft and easy-to-play-against club, then you can put those opinions to bed as of this morning.
The numbers don’t lie:
Head coach Pat Quinn: 1,300-plus NHL games coached; two Jack Adams Awards; 92 playoff games and two Stanley Cup Final appearances; a gold medal in Salt Lake in ’02; a World Cup gold in ’04; World Junior gold in ’08.
Associate coach Tom Renney: Six seasons as an NHL head coach, the past five with the New York Rangers; a ton of international experience, with 10 World Championships in various coaching capacities; a Memorial Cup in Kamloops, where he had a .714 winning percentage tops in CHL history.
One is old school. The other, a new-age technical guy.
Coaching is like the November schedule. You can’t make the playoffs on good coaching alone, but anything less can surely cost you a spot.
So the Edmonton Oilers can safely say that in Quinn, Renney, assistant Kelly Buchberger and an assistant to be named later [Why not Perry Pearn?], if this group has not experienced something in the game before, it probably hasn’t happened.
"We have two people here," said Renney, with a nod over to Quinn, "who can match the coaching brain power of anyone we come up against."
It is, at the very least, a successful, safe move to begin a rebuild for an organization that reached its nadir last season.
Somehow, under a former coach in Craig MacTavish and an outgoing general manager in Kevin Lowe — two players who made a living off of their compete levels and willingness to pay the price — the Oilers became a team that didn’t play hard enough. That didn’t want it bad enough.
Out went MacTavish after eight seasons, and Lowe completed the transition of the GM’s duties to Steve Tambellini. The new GM asked himself what is team lacked, and found it to be toughness, grit and size.
So he went looking for that big, tough, abrasive old cuss who gave him his first front office job in Vancouver in 1996, and Pat Quinn picked up the phone. Now, Tambellini was interviewing Quinn, whose last NHL head coaching gig was 2005-06 with Toronto.
"I knew I was too young not to be part of the game somewhere," said Quinn, a 66-year-old Fred Shero disciple. "I really knew I wanted to be part of this game again. I am so happy for this opportunity."
Happier still, he said, because the job comes in Canada, with a "historic organization," in a town where hockey comes first.
"I’m getting an opportunity that I wasn’t sure was going to come my way," said Quinn, who won a Memorial Cup as an Edmonton Oil Kings defenceman back in 1963. "I am very anxious to make this the best stop that I’ve had."
So, why these two? And in this capacity?
Why does a current head coach like Renney take the job as Associate — particularly when he had further interviews scheduled around the league?
And why, with one of the youngest teams in the league, do the Oilers tap an old cedar like Quinn for leadership? A guy who can say he played in tube skates for teams like the Seattle Totems and the Hamilton Tiger Cubs?
The feeling here is that whatever technical attributes escape Quinn are going to be right in Renney’s wheel house. Whatever experience deficiencies Renney is stuck with, never having played the game at a high level, Quinn’s 15 years of pro hockey — played back when men were men — can provide.
And between both sets of experienced eyes, an Oilers lineup that has become fond of fooling themselves into thinking it is working hard enough will be held accountable.
Even if Quinn has always been noted as a "players’ coach."
"Players coaches are demanding too," Quinn said. "If our veterans are apt to put their feet up on the desk once in a while, we’ll have to change that."
Change is in the air in Edmonton.
So far, it’s all making pretty good sense.