The 2011-12 season will be an extremely important one in the Flyers coaching tenure of Peter Laviolette. Amidst rumors of players and the coach not being on the same page during key portions of last season, the club has undergone a significant makeover (at least among its forward corps and in goal).
Laviolette's legacy to date in Philly is a rather mixed bag of dramatic success, dramatic failure and near-disaster that turned out well.
There will be a lot of pressure on Laviolette to successfully oversee the integration of so many new faces early in the season and to also prevent the club from burning out down the stretch. If you look at Laviolette's 1 1/2 season tenure to date, the stretch drives in each of the last seasons have been awful. It took a shootout win on the final day of the 2009-10 season to make the playoffs. Of course, the flip side to that is the fact that the club reached the Stanley Cup Final in 2010 and compiled 106 points in winning the Atlantic Division last season.
Laviolette's credentials as a top coach are also bolstered by his previous Stanley Cup ring when he was behind the bench in Carolina as well as the way he coaxed the New York Islanders into a pair of consecutive playoff appearances after missing the playoffs in each of the seven previous seasons. His credentials are hurt by his reputation as a coach with a shorter-than-average shelf life in the locker room, based largely on the Hurricanes' immediate burnout after their Cup season.
Flyers management has given Laviolette a strong vote of confidence and a change in the locker room (led by a veteran group that absolutely detests losing). We will see over the next season whether Lavy strengthens his grip to the point of potentially becoming a long-tenured coach in Philadelphia or one who had quick success followed by diminishing returns. There are still lingering question marks over his handling of the playoff goalie rotation and his degree of open two-way communication lines. This year, he's got his clear-cut number one goalie and most of the players who publicly or privately griped about their ice time or aspects of his system are now gone from the team.
In terms of Laviolette's ranking among all-time Flyers coaches, I would not currently put him among the top five. However, the team's run to the Cup Final has to carry weight. The team's performance next season could springboard Laviolette's reputation if the club overachieves during its transitional phase.
Here's how I would rank the Flyers' coaches all-time, from best to the worst.
1. Shero
2. Keenan
3. Quinn
4. Murray
5. Hitchcock
6. Neilson
7. Laviolette
8. Allen
9. Dineen
10. Barber
11. Stevens
12. Holmgren
13. Ramsay
14. Stasiuk
15. Simpson
16. McCammon
17. Cashman
The Top 5
1. Fred Shero: Can someone please explain to me why the Fog is still not enshrined as a builder in the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto, apart from the fact than some influential committee people hold to the false belief that Shero and the 1970s Flyers were singlehandedly responsible for the "Slap Shot" image of the game? Shero was one of the game's all-time innovators and most fascinating characters. He was the first NHL coach to ask management to hire assistant coaches. People also forget that he ahead of his time in studying Russian hockey and advocating for NHL teams to sign top European players. Most of all, he was a winner everywhere he coached.
2. Mike Keenan: Keenan took the youngest team in the NHL and made it into an instant Cup contender. His players detested him and many were ready to stage a mutiny even after three straight first-place seasons and two trips to the Stanley Cup Finals. "Iron Mike's" dictatorial style stopped working his fourth year and then he was gone. But while Keenan (by his own admission) went overboard in his rule by fear and humiliation, he also got his Flyers players to play the best hockey of their lives while uniting against him as a common enemy. In more recent times, Keenan has made efforts to adapt his style to today's players but has met with spotty success.
3. Pat Quinn: Quinn was not too far removed from his own playing days when he was promoted from Maine Mariners head coach to take over for Bob McCammon during the 1978-79 season. The following year, Quinn led the club to a record-setting 35-game unbeaten streak and a trip to the Stanley Cup Finals. The rest of his tenure was unremarkable but he went on to have tremendous longevity as a coach and/or GM. Quinn is the one of the game's all-time best at working the refs to get marginal penalty calls made against the opposition.
4. Terry Murray: Murray deserves a share of the credit for the Flyers' dramatic improvement in the mid-1990s after missing the playoffs five straight years. While he took his share of criticism (and doomed his own tenure with his "choking situation" comments during the 1997 Stanley Cup Finals), he also helped the club improve by leaps and bounds in terms of demanding a team-wide commitment to defense. Mikael Renberg and several others players from those teams have said in retrospect that they learned more from Murray than any coach for whom they've played.
5. Ken Hitchcock: I would rank Hitchcock third on this list (ahead of Quinn) if his entire NHL coaching career was the only consideration, but I'd rank his Flyers head coaching tenure behind those of the coaches who got the club to the Finals. He was a Cup winner in Dallas. Hitch's 2003-04 club came within a game of the Finals, and coaching wasn't the determining factor in the Eastern Conference Finals loss to Tampa Bay. Nevertheless, none of Hitchcock's Philly teams ever got over the hump.
He had many pluses during his tenure. Until the disastrous start of the 2006-07 season, his clubs always looked organized and well-prepared. Go back and watch the Flyers' series victories over Toronto in 2003 and 2004 and New Jersey in 2004, paying close attention to the way the team organized its breakouts. Even when he had less-than-ideal personnel on the backline, the team's breakouts were smooth and crisp. For most of Hitch's tenure, even the players who thought he was a control-freak and micromanager eventually bought in to his system because the club won with it.
The negatives: The club's special-teams shortcomings, which he often insisted were correctable and minor flaws, never seemed to get corrected. And Hitchcock was often mistrusting and overly critical of some of his young players, which was surprising because his first success as a coach came in the junior ranks with Kamloops. But I still think that Murray did a better job bringing along some the young Flyers players with whom he worked in the mid-1990s than Hitch did in the early to mid 2000s.
Honorable mentions:
Keith Allen: Better known for crafting the Flyers' Cup-winning and Cup-contending teams of the mid-1970s to early 1980s as the team's GM, Allen also led the team to the Western Conference championship in its first season.
While that feat was a somewhat modest accomplishment (the team was basically a .500 squad playing in a division comprised entirely of first-season expansion clubs), the first-season Flyers beat each of the Original Six at least once. Allen's Flyers had very little scoring punch and were undersized club that intimidated no one. But they were very defensively sound and had good goaltending. In any era, that equates to a competitive team.
Roger Neilson: During his tenure, most everyone thought that Neilson's Flyers were a goaltending upgrade away from bringing Philly its first Cup since 1975, especially in the 1999-2000 season. It wasn't to be, of course. Neilson was a pretty remarkable human being and a good coach. In some ways, he was very much like Fred Shero in terms of being a coaching maverick who thought about and studied the game on virtually a 24/7 basis. He was never afraid to try new, innovative ideas even if others thought he was nuts.
Off the ice, Neilson had a bit of absent-minded professor quality to him. In other ways, he was completely different than Shero. Freddie the Fog drank excessively, was painfully shy and had trouble relating to people away from the game. Neilson was very religious, a teetotaler and more comfortable holding regular conversations. Unlike Shero, he'd let people get to know him.
If you discount everything else in their respective careers, Laviolette may have already surpassed Neilson on the Flyers' list. However, in terms of permanent legacy in the sport, Roger left an indelible mark that Lavy (and most every other coach today) can only aspire to reach someday. That carries weight, too. Laviolette is a good coach with an good track record, but Roger was a legend.
The Bottom 5
1. Wayne Cashman: The Flyers made a huge mistake handing the reigns over to Cashman after their trip to the 1997 Finals. He had no head coaching experience and it showed. The 1997-98 season was one of utter chaos. The inmates ran the asylum and the team misplaced its work ethic, discipline and commitment to defense before Cashman was demoted to assistant coach and Roger Neilson was brought in. The team had a deceptive record (32-20-9) during Cashman's brief tenure. The club had enough offensive firepower to overcome a myriad of other flaws but the seeds of the five-game first round playoff loss to Buffalo were sewn during Cashman's time as head coach.
Side note: Cashman is one of the very few hockey people with whom I'd ever had a negative personal experience. He was supposedly a fun-loving quipster and perhaps he was, at least around fellow hockey people. But the guy I met twice (once as a fan at the Flyers Carnival, once as a young writer for Hockey's Future) was one of the miserable people I've ever met. Simple courtesies like responding in kind to a "hello" or saying "you're welcome" when thanked for his time appeared to be foreign concepts to him. It wasn't absent-mindedness or shyness -- he just came off as a grouch.
I know people who dealt with Cashman during his subsequent ECHL coaching tenure in Pensacola and was told that my experience with Cashman was more or less the norm unless he knew you.
2. Bob McCammon: As a general manager, McCammon was an excellent judge of talent and very good at running the draft. But he was a mediocre head coach. No coach in Flyers history did less with more than McCammon in either of his two stints as Flyers' head coach. His main positive contribution to the Flyers was his central role in the club's
outstanding drafts of 1983 and 1984.
3. Terry Simpson: Simpson's 1993-94 Flyers team was good enough to make the playoffs and probably would have if Eric Lindros had not gone down in November with a knee injury that cost him 14 games. Simpson didn't have much to work with in certain areas (especially the blueline) but had to be held responsible for the fact that the club never showed improvement in any significant area over the course of the entire season.
Early in the 1993-94 season, the Flyers outscored their defensive mistakes and mediocre goaltending but the bottom dropped out and Simpson never got the club back on course. He waited too long to make adjustments and then, when the club was in desperate need of points to salvage a playoff spot, he suddenly decided it was time to break up all his lines. The moves he made were bizarre at best.
Suffice to say, separating Eric Lindros from Mark Recchi and Mikael Renberg to put the three players on three different lines in must-win games after the All-Star break didn't work very well. The line of Lindros with Dave Brown and Al Conroy didn't exactly conjure images of the Flyers' LCB line of yore (at least the "L" component was superior). Defensively the club remained awful and the goaltending duo of Dominic Roussel and Tommy Söderström had a tendency to let in at least one awful goal per game.
4. Vic Stasiuk: Joe Watson described the Flyers' second head coach as an "interesting guy, but not a good coach." According to Watson, "We could never comprehend what he was trying to tell us. He’d say things like, ‘Check but don’t check.’ What the hell does that mean? Beats me. He would try to change your skating style, too, which is virtually impossible to do.”
Stasiuk’s Flyers never got very far. On June 2, 1971, Allen relieved Stasiuk of his duties and replaced him with Fred Shero. Stasiuk went on to coach the woeful California Seals and the Vancouver Canucks.
5. Craig Ramsay: I was happy that "Rammer" got another shot at being an NHL head coach last season in Atlanta. He's a quality person who is widely respected around the game. He deserved another chance. Unfortunately, he's always been held up as an example of someone who makes for an outstanding NHL assistant coach -- a good teacher, communicator and listener who cares about what his players have to say but who may not have the disposition needed of a long-term NHL head coach. He's a true gentleman, however, and any number of the players he's worked with around the NHL sing his praises as one of the best assistant coaches with whom they've ever worked.
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