The answer to the question “How long does an NHL coaching tenure last?” changes depending on how far back you want to make the cut-off, but if you keep it reasonable, you’re going to come to a similar answer:
Less than 2.5 seasons, and moving closer to 2.3.
That’s shocking considering almost nobody signs two-year deals, so all these guys are owed millions when they get fired, but it’s “worth it” to the owners to bring in someone new.
It’s also nuts when you consider how long it takes just to get the lay of the land with a new team. You’ve got to get to know all the different staff, sure, but also each player, which is a huge challenge. Your job is to find out what motivates each guy in order to get the best out of them, and you walk in cold. You have to get to know 30-plus players in the organization who will either be on your team or the next men up if it’s close.
By the time you get fully acclimated, teach your preferred systems to the players, get to know them, and get some games under your belt, it’s Christmas, and less than two seasons later, you’re probably gone.
As a generalization, it doesn’t seem fair. But it’s not hard to see what’s happening either.
A few reasons why coaching tenures are getting so short
1. Under the salary cap, it was one of the few tangible changes you could make
This may change as the cap skyrockets in the coming years, but for the past decade, moving players was almost impossible. If you were struggling and wanted to make changes, you basically couldn’t. The good teams that would trade for your players couldn’t fit them under their own caps. To accommodate that, along came these double retention deals as teams struggled to find ways to make meaningful change.
But if you had some overpaid guys on immovable contracts, how could you tangibly affect the roster? Well, swap out the coach, who doesn’t count against anyone’s cap if your owner’s got the bucks (and they do).
It became not an option, but 'The Option' to show you wanted to improve.
2. The power dynamic has shifted
For years, the coach was the boss, and the players basically feared the coach. What they said went, as they held all the player's opportunity in their hands, and thus, their future. The players were subordinate to the Mike Keenans and Scotty Bowmans and Al Arbours.
But as player salaries ticked up, that dynamic shifted. Owners came to realize that their star players were more valuable than their coaches, as they sold tickets and jerseys and had a bigger effect on wins and losses. Players got longer contracts — far longer than coaches — and so it became clear who would be there longer, and whose team it really was.
So the stars became the ones with more organizational sway. Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl did not get Kris Knoblauch fired. But when they called him out in the media a few times, it was tough to miss their preference on the team’s next direction, and since the team cares most about those guys (as they should), they made the relatively easy call.
3. As individualism flourishes in society, it’s gotten harder to coach the collective group
In reality, most of the players have moved into that role of “more sway than the coach.” Coaches getting fired this frequently only amplifies that problem — if you don’t like your coach, you’ve just gotta be subordinate and hang on for a year or so.
There’s also been this collective realization with 32 teams that if you’re good enough to play in the league, you’ll play in the league, and guys have agents who tell them to just play their game and not change for anyone. They all grew up as the best players on their respective teams, and in general, over the years, youth has had less reverence for the older generations. Combined, these guys are just not as quick to do whatever their coach asks, save for the truly fringe players. They think they know the right way to have success, since they’ve had success on the way up.
A team needs to pull together and play as one, to buy in, but when individual cracks start to show, it gets harder for a coach to accomplish that. Once guys see others on their own page, they figure, "Why shouldn’t I too?”
What it seems like to me these days is that a coach needs a good story. You have to be someone who’s won, and if not, you need to be the next wunderkind, or you just need some hook. You won’t convince everyone you’ve got it figured out, but if you can’t have the majority of your team believing that you’ll find the answers, it’s over.
And last:
4. Other teams picking up the tab of the fired coach is ridiculous
The NHL is largely a league of retreads for head coaches. Maybe there are 40 guys considered worthy of the 32 jobs, which is, of course, incorrect, but that’s where we’re at. When a team fires a coach and another team hires that man for the next year, they’re no longer on the hook for the full, owed contract. More accurately, if you fire a coach who’s owed $4 million next year, and a team offers him a deal at $3 million per year for three years, they now only owe him $1 million for the overlapping year they fired him. If they pay him $4 million, the firing team owes him nothing. Since most of these guys get rehired, the punishment for firing established coaches is almost non-existent. (This is patently ridiculous, as is a fired coach needing permission to go coach somewhere else, and both will change because they have to.)
So I guess the question is, how much of this is fair? Are coaches getting a raw deal?
As easy as it is to say yes — and it is when it comes to number four above — the deal isn’t terrible in its entirety.
For one, guys are almost always compensated for their time between jobs, whether it be a year or two or whatever, so that’s a plus. It’s rare that a guy just coaches until the last day of his contract, it expires, and teams part. It almost never happens.
The other part of this is that I do think two seasons is generally enough to know if the team is bought in and following the coach or not. And if they’re not, like a fisherman trolling a lake for two hours without a bite, at some point you need to change the lure.
The challenge that presents is “How much can you hold players accountable, when many of them can essentially have you fired?” I say “have you fired” in the sense that if players quit (don’t give their best), or sound off to the media, it becomes clear there are dressing room issues, and it becomes the beginning of the end.
My one belief here is that you can’t coach in fear. You’re probably going to get fired at some point, and possibly in short order, so you have to establish your beliefs early and stick to them. If you’re a guy who takes ice time away for negligent play, do it in the first few weeks, or later it seems like a much bigger deal. If you healthy scratch guys, let them know how you operate and do it fairly and consistently. You just can’t tiptoe in and lead like a mouse, acquiescing to the opinions of the 20-year-old talents. You have to grab the room from the jump.
If you look at the longest tenured guys — Jon Cooper (a 2013 hire), Jared Bednar (2016), Rod Brind’Amour (2018) and the like — it’s clear you have to have a few qualities.
1. Conviction in the way you want your team to play, and the discipline to stick to it.
2. A soft touch to not over-react to every little thing.
3. The hammer when things really go off the rails.
4. The respect of your players.
And that’s where I’ll leave it, on that last point.
With the shift in the power dynamic, coaching is much more of a partnership with your players than ever before. That’s not to say you’re equal partners; decisions cannot be made democratically (your players can have input, but they are not an equal vote), but you have to have a mutual respect.
If you’re genuinely trying to put them in a position to succeed and are hearing them out when they disagree, you’ve got a much better chance of getting them to listen to your message, too.
In the end, one team gets to win the Cup, four teams are said to have had successful seasons, and basically every team that doesn’t see the second round is mad about how their season went. That leaves something in the range of 16-24 teams looking to change their results, and no matter what you do, some coaches are going to take the bullets.
The players are humans, humans have problems, and there’s only so much these coaches can control. It’s a tough racket.
It’s hard to see coaching tenures ever going back to term-length much longer than we see now. So for coaches, pick your spots wisely, stick to your beliefs, and don’t waver. And behind the scenes, let’s get the movement going so these guys can be paid by multiple teams at once, shall we? If NHL owners want to pay a guy to not work, let ‘em, and don’t take ‘em off the hook.
