The sun rose in Edmonton this morning, where Kris Knoblauch will try to pick up the pieces of a Stanley Cup contender that is unfathomably the second-worst team in the league after 13 games.
No one saw this coming a month ago, when many projected the Oilers as Canada’s best hope. Heck, Jay Woodcroft had been one of Edmonton’s most successful regular-season coaches ever, by winning percentage.
On Nov. 12, he was out of a job.
The fact is that this situation is unique to itself. Coaching changes have happened very early in the season before — and several times earlier than this — but most often those occur with young teams or bad teams or teams that expected to compete to qualify for the playoffs and were lagging behind.
A top-of-the-line Stanley Cup contender does not often find itself here.
Early season coaching changes don’t always work out, but there are also a few examples that should give hope to Oilers fans that this season can still be salvaged.
Here is a look at six other examples where teams dismissed a head coach fairly early in a season, and then how that team responded the rest of the way…
2008-09 Chicago Blackhawks
Fired: Denis Savard after 1-2-1 start
Hired: Joel Quenneville
The result: The first NHL coach Patrick Kane and Jonathan Toews had was Savard, a long-time Blackhawks player who had been an assistant with the team for eight years before taking over the head job. In their rookie season, 2007-08, the Hawks won 40 games for the first time in five seasons and were on the ascent.
But 2008-09 started slowly, with management describing a “flat camp” setting the tone. Savard was actually fired after the Hawks picked up their first win, but 1-2-1 was enough for GM Dale Tallon (and new-ish owner Rocky Wirtz) to pull the chute on Oct. 16 and hire Joel Quenneville, who was working for the team as a scout at the time.
Chicago went 6-1-3 in their first 10 under Quenneville and rallied to finish with 104 points, third-most in the Western Conference. In the playoffs they went to the conference final, then won the Stanley Cup the following season.
2011-12 Los Angeles Kings
Fired: Terry Murray after 13-12-4 start
Hired: Interim John Stevens for four games, then Darryl Sutter
The result: Full of promise and potential, the Kings were floundering in 2011-12 as the offence sagged and a two-season playoff streak seemed at risk. A four-game losing streak in early-December sunk the Kings to 10th in the Western Conference and led GM Dean Lombardi to fire Terry Murray on Dec. 12, 29 games into his fourth season as Kings head coach.
In his place came Sutter, who was five years on from his last head coaching gig with the Calgary Flames. It was also the second time Lombardi had hired Sutter to be a head coach, first doing so with the San Jose Sharks in 1997-98.
This time, in Los Angeles, Sutter got an immediate bump, losing in regulation just twice in his first month (8-2-6). Through the entire rest of the season under Sutter, Los Angeles was the NHL’s seventh-best team, going 11-4-3 down the stretch to claim the West’s last playoff spot by five points over Calgary. The offence did not improve — it was among the league’s worst — but they were a defensive juggernaut and an analytics darling in the nascent era of fancy stats. That style led to a Stanley Cup championship in 2012 as the Kings blew through four rounds of playoff hockey in just 20 games.
2013-14 Philadelphia Flyers
Fired: Peter Laviolette after 0-3-0 start
Hired: Craig Berube
The result: There’s two ends to this one. Just 26 games into the 2009-10 season the Flyers fired John Stevens as head coach and replaced him with Laviolette, whose first games in the organization continued a bad stretch (2-7-1) before they started to turn it around in the middle of the season. Still, a final-game shootout win is what they needed to just reach the playoffs — but then they went all the way to the Stanley Cup Final in Year 1 under Laviolette.
After that success, Laviolette oversaw the Flyers to back-to-back second round exits and then they missed the playoffs entirely in the lockout-shortened 2013 season. That did not sit well with owner Ed Snider, who then was critical of what he saw as a weak training camp, and an 0-3-0 start was enough to change gears on Oct. 7.
“I thought our training camp, quite frankly, was one of the worst training camps I’ve ever seen,” Snider said at the time. “I’m not talking about wins or losses. There was nothing exciting. Nobody shined. Nobody looked good. I couldn’t point to one thing that I thought was a positive.”
The Flyers promoted Craig Berube from assistant to his first NHL head coaching job and while he won his first game in the role, the Flyers then lost another four in a row right after. But from Nov. 1 onward, Philadelphia posted a .620 points percentage that was eighth best in the league and qualified as the No. 6 seed in the Eastern Conference. There, they lost in seven games to the N.Y. Rangers and then a year later Berube was let go after missing the playoffs.
2016-17 Florida Panthers
Fired: Gerard Gallant after 11-10-1 start
Hired: Tom Rowe
The result: In 2015-16, his second season as Panthers coach, Gerard Gallant led Florida to its first playoff appearance in five years, their best regular season in team history, and he was runner-up for the Jack Adams Award as coach of the year. So it was quite surprising when he was let go by the team on Nov. 27 after an 11-10-1 start in 2016-17.
This was during a tumultuous time in Florida’s front office, when an “analytics experiment” was wrestling with former GM Dale Tallon, who had been moved into an executive role. It was all quite messy — and ended with Tallon back in the GM chair in April of 2017 — and Gallant was caught in the crossfire.
The visuals of him with his bags, catching a cab after the dismissal were the talk of social media. Gallant wasn’t notified of the news until after speaking to the media following a 3-2 loss to Carolina. Ever since, this episode has basically become a course in how not to fire an NHL head coach.
The team’s GM at the time, Tom Rowe, moved into the head coaching job and he finished out that season 24-27-10 as the Panthers missed the playoffs by 14 points. Bob Boughner took over the following season, but Florida didn’t make the playoffs again until the pandemic seasons.
2018-19 St. Louis Blues
Fired: Mike Yeo after 7-9-3 start
Hired: Craig Berube
After missing the playoffs in 2018 and suffering through a slow start in a new season, back-to-back shutout losses were ultimately the last straw in Mike Yeo’s tenure as Blues head coach. GM Doug Armstrong made the change on Nov. 19, promoting associate Berube into the top job, but only on an interim basis.
“The interim tag [on Berube] is based on a decision made last night,” Armstrong said at the time. “He did a very good job with our American Hockey League affiliate, he’s got experience, he’s going to be given that opportunity, but as a manager, you have to multitask. … I’m going to throw my full support behind Craig and his staff right now as we try and cauterize the wound and get back into the playoff picture.”
Armstrong did not rule out hiring another full-time head coach before the end of the season, but it never came to that. Berube started with a 6-6-1 record and as the calendar flipped in January to 2019 St. Louis’ 34 points were tied for fewest in the league.
Then, it began. Berube turned to young goalie named Jordan Binnington in January as he was brought up from the AHL and the Blues charged forward with a 30-10-5 record the rest of the way, finishing third in the Central Division and reaching the playoffs. From there they went all the way to the Stanley Cup, winning two series in six games and the other two in seven games.
This remains the major turnaround season that all early strugglers hope to be able to replicate.
2019-20 Toronto Maple Leafs
Fired: Mike Babcock after 9-10-4 start
Hired: Sheldon Keefe
The Leafs hired Mike Babcock to great fanfare and expectation in 2015 as the team eyed turning into a competitive unit with a new, young core. After missing the playoffs in Year 1, Babcock oversaw three straight playoff appearances, but no series wins.
Babcock and the Leafs struggled to find consistency in 2019 and a five-game losing skid in November prompted the team to act. GM Kyle Dubas, in that job since May of 2018, made his first coaching decision by replacing Babcock with Sheldon Keefe, whom he had worked with in OHL Sault Ste. Marie and AHL Toronto, winning a Calder Cup in 2018.
The Leafs won their first three games under Keefe and posted the NHL’s eighth-best points percentage from the time he took over until the league was forced to stop play due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Toronto, of course, didn’t win their first playoff round until 2023 with this group, and in that first attempt under Keefe dropped a one-off qualifying round, best-of-five series to Columbus. Keefe has since outlasted Dubas in the organization.