The biggest (and old now) news out of the Canes camp is that Eric Staal escaped his injury in the Sweden with only a major sprain and is expected to be ready for the start of training camp. Exhale....
Onward with my review of the Canes personnel during the 2013 season building toward my thoughts on how to quickly patch a couple holes and put a playoff team on the ice for the 2013-14 season.
Cutting to the chase…I would rate Kirk Muller’s performance in 2013-14 as a C+, but if I were GM of the Carolina Hurricanes, I would keep him to start the 2013-14 season.
Here are my reasons why:
1) I am generally not a fan of making rash coaching decisions. The damage done from lack of continuity usually outweighs short-term gains in personnel. So unless you think you just erred in your initial thought process in hiring a coach, you need to give him some time to settle in, instill a system and style and build a team. It goes way back, but Rutherford's choice of a young coach in Muller and his commitment to his development (if it holds) would be similar to the path he took with Paul Maurice way back when.
2) It is really difficult to read too much into 2013 anyway. I do think you have to hold everyone including Muller accountable for what was a disappointment of a season. But with no training camp, a shortened season, an influx of new key players and some important injuries, it is hard to do a fair evaluation of coaching versus swirling circumstances. The team did start very well before collapsing.
3) I was impressed with Muller’s ability to keep hold of the team given its demise. When things go badly in an NHL season with much higher expectations, one of the most important questions to answer is whether the coach lost the team commitment-wise. When this happens it is usually very difficult to right the ship even with a fresh start the next year. From all that I can saw publicly, the locker room and coach/player connections held together despite the on-ice struggles.
On the positive side for Muller’s 2013 season, I give him credit for:
1) Seemingly maintaining the locker room even under adversity. The team did not pack it in and quit when it could have. I think this is a testament to Muller and the player leadership.
2) Handling adversity well. I am not at all a fan of tossing players under the bus publicly when things go bad. There are some coaches that make a living doing this (Mike Kenan maybe most notable). This coaching style seems capable of providing short jolts of higher effort and sometimes results, but this caustic approach is usually not sustainable and therefore not a viable path to long-term progress.
3) Identifying the 1st line combination and then resisting the temptation to mess with it to try to fix everything else that was broken. People might forget that EStaal/Semin started reasonably well, but it took a few iterations to find Tlusty as the 3rd forward. That is when it took off.
But I think Muller also gets his fair share of the blame for the season ultimately going awry. Yes there were injury issues. And per my evaluation of Jim Rutherford, I think he was hamstrung with a defensive corps that was a tough proposition even before injuries. But taking the pieces you have and figuring out how to get enough out of them is a key component of an NHL coach’s job. Sure there are teams that were doomed by injuries like the Canes, but then there were also teams like Ottawa (missing 2 top forwards, Norris trophy caliber defenseman and top 2 goalies) who relied on a solid system and continued winning and Detroit whose leaders were enough to eke out points until they could get healthier.
I think a number of Muller’s failings or struggles in 2013 were things that I think you improve upon with experience. At the most basic level, my greatest concern is that his approach to building a team might be a bit rigid and his willingness/ability to maneuver from what he thought would work to what will work a bit slow. There is a balance to building a team a certain way which takes time to adjust personnel and capitalizing on the strengths you have to win now. We have all heard the mantra of getting bigger and more physical especially in the bottom half of the forward ranks. To some degree, I think this is becoming more of a necessity in the NHL. And I think it makes sense that the Canes move in this direction. But as a head coach, I think a significant part of the job is taking the puzzle pieces you are given and figuring out to put them together and then doing it again and again when things break or players get hurt or whatever other obstacles you encounter during a long NHL season.
The areas where I think Muller could have been better in 2013 include:
1) Special teams. Over the full 48 games, I do not think we saw a single stretch of extended success for either the power play or the penalty kill. More than any other part of the game, special teams are coachable system type of thing. Especially on the power play, there was no shortage of options. The Canes had a couple left-shot sniper types in EStaal and Skinner, the same from the right side in Semin, a decent big body/faceoff center in JStaal, proven playmaking capability in Jokinen and a reasonable compliment of offense-oriented defensemen who have logged their share of power play minutes in McBain, Pitkanen, Corvo and Faulk. But the power play finished 27th out of 30 in the league. Minus Bryan Allen and plus Joe Corvo on the blue line, I am not sure Muller was in quite as good of a position personnel-wise for the penalty kill, but with the key players for PK mostly healthy there were enough options, and the penalty kill finished 28th out of 30. Some say more than any other facet of NHL team performance special teams are the thing you can hang on the coach.
2) Inability to find comfort zones/roles for key players. I realize at the end of the day that the players are the ones that need to step on the ice and perform. But part of the coach’s role is to identify and put them in situations that play to their strengths and in which they can succeed. Past the brilliance and magic of the Tlusty/EStaal/Semin line, I am not sure that Muller identified anything else that really worked for anyone else in the forward ranks. (The lone argument for an exception is Skinner/JStaal for maybe the first 15 games, but my opinion is that this fit of fortune had a negative long-term impact when Skinner got off to a fast start solely because of his individual playmaking and this muddied the picture and suggested that maybe there was actually chemistry between the two when maybe there never really was. Ruutu’s long-term injury did not help matters but going 0-for-the forwards past the top 3 was not good enough and the resulting lack of secondary scoring, ability to build a good checking line or really much of any contribution from the other 9 forwards played a significant part in the team’s ultimate doom.
--JStaal. I actually think his scoring totals were okay (more on that when I evaluate him), but in earning the worst +/- on the roster, he was nothing remotely close to the solid 2-way forward he was in Pittsburgh.
--Skinner. He started strong but then struggled offensively after that for the most part and made only minimal progress in being a decent complementary forward to JStaal.
--Dwyer. He was over slotted due to Ruutu’s injury but still with more minutes and more skilled line mates you would expect some modest increase in offensive production but instead it decreased.
--Jokinen. He had proven to be a solid offensive contributor in past seasons. He completely fell off a cliff this season.
--Nash, Bowman, Dalpe, Boychuk. Maybe it is more a testament to these players’ development in the system, but Muller went 0-4 coaxing some scoring balance for the young prospects.
--Larose. He is another who I think is over slotted, but he has proven capable of some offense at the NHL season before this one.
--While I would not call the defense pairings a success either, I think the combination of what he was given by Rutherford to start the year combined with the biggest injury hit to the most important players, I am not sure there is too much Muller could have done.
3) Jussi Jokinen. I detailed this previously. Simple point is that he was a very productive Cane 2 years ago and even with a drop-off reasonably productive last year. I think Muller got tunnel vision trying to force fit him into a 3rd line slot devoid of complementary offensive line mates. He got only limited ice time with JStaal despite the fact that he seemed to need help too and never really got a shot a jumpstarting his season with Ruutu when he returned. I think Jokinen is the most glaring example, but I think you could make a case that Muller did not get the most out of Larose, Bowman, Dwyer and other players who had contributed more in the past.
4) Inability to adjust on the fly and find a way to grind out points during difficult stretch. To be completely honest, this last one is more of a burning question than an assertion. When the Canes hit the never-ending skid, the team seemed incapable of climbing out of it. Some line tinkering was done, but despite losing by 3-4 goals on a game-by-game basis for multiple weeks, all that kept coming out of Muller press conferences and interviews was the need to stick with the system and keep working hard. The result for a few weeks was a bad hockey team losing almost every hockey game and measuring its unrewarded progress mostly in terms of shots on goal. I realize that the goaltending was real rough during this stretch. And I realize that there were legitimately games where the team seemed to deserve better. But it was also incredibly reminiscent of some horrible Canes teams in the early 2000s that just always “faced another hot goalie.” But I think at times measuring shots on goal can be the easy cop out to make losing okay. What about measuring shots on goal or even in the vicinity with at least 1 Cane close enough to the goalie/crease to make it challenging for the goalie versus just the random chucking of low-percentage shots at the net. So I digress a bit for context, but my point is that during the worst of the Canes 2013 downturn, I just did not see much in terms of coaching maneuvering trying to jumpstart things before it was too late or maybe trying to tighten up the system to such a conservative level that the team could claw its way to some 3-2 OTLs until the reinforcements arrived off the injury list, or just something/anything that looked different. But again, I am honestly not sure where I sit with this one. With subpar goaltending and key defenders from a thin blue line hurt, maybe there just wasn’t a way. If so, I guess I am jealous of Ottawa’s depth in net and on defense, because they had it just as bad or worse in terms of key players going down in unison and forged along just fine. I will be watching closely to see what happens next time the Canes hit one of these skids to see if Muller can help the team climb out of it faster or if it feels too much like “we just need to work harder” each and every time.
So I rated Kirk Muller at C+ (pretty similar to Jim Rutherford) for the season. I think he is going to be a good NHL coach, but I think the Canes struggles in 2013 may have highlighted his inexperience as a head coach and also demonstrated that just like any other job there is a learning process. This would work fine if the Canes were in rebuilding mode where a young group of players was growing together with a relatively new NHL head coach. But the Canes are not rebuilding. The team is trying to win now. For better or worse, this necessitates a more short-term evaluation process as the Canes move into the 2013-14 season.
Next up I will start into sorting out the player evaluations and where I think people fit going forward. The starting point is an attempt to slot the forwards in terms of line and role capabilities going forward. I will try to clean up my draft of that blog and get it posted in the next couple days.
For a quick heads up when I post a Canes blog or for the occasional online debate, follow me on Twitter at CarolinaMatt63.
Go Canes!
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