I Don't See The Point
Joel Quenneville returns, and playoff thoughts.
-The news of the day in the NHL is Joel Quenneville returning to coaching with the Anaheim Ducks next season. There are two points I'd like to address about it.
The first is if you're reading this, chances are you were a Hawks fan during the Cup runs, and you know how the organization worked beneath the hood back then. While I don't think anyone from that time should be working in hockey again, much less the NHL, we know that there were two people who drew all the water in the front office. They were John McDonough and Joel Quenneville.
I'm not trying to absolve Stan Bowman by calling him a stooge back then. He had responsibilities that he shirked, and if nothing else could have spoken up to be shouted down by McDonough and Quenneville. Bowman, at the time, was still the sniveling failson of the invisible hand that was Scotty Bowman, the guy who was telling the hockey-novice McDonough what to do. Bowman only had the job because he and McDonough had torpedoed Dale Tallon out of it because Scotty Bowman wanted his son to have it. It's no defense, but it's not hard to see why Stan Bowman did whatever he was told by McDonough. When McDonough said he would handle anything, Bowman served his role, which was to nod and shut up.
While Quenneville was a McDonough hire and McDonough guy too, he carried far more weight (the who civil war in the Hawks front office that would start in 2012 and rage on for six more years was basically due to this). He had bonafides in the league already, which Bowman didn't, other than his last name. He was the proof of just how much more adult the Hawks were being run under Rocky Wirtz and McDonough when they turfed eternal franchise mascot Denis Savard for him. Quenneville was the symbol, and in a lot of ways the catalyst, for the Hawks "growing up" after the Dollar Bill era. He was far more a beacon than Bowman.
Which is why when you read the Jenner and Block report, the two voices that are all over it are Quenneville and McDonough. The first one even mentioned in that meeting after the Western Conference final is Quenneville. "It's so hard to get here." Make no mistake, they were the driving forces of the Hawks' complete inaction. Everyone on the coaching staff and front office involved is guilty, but if there are degrees to it (and I don't know that there should be), then McDonough and Quenneville carry most of it.
Cowering in the corner shouldn't have been an absolution for Stan Bowman to work again in Edmonton. But at least if I squint I guess I could see it, when combined with the unwavering support and documentation of his work with Sheldon Kennedy. Obviously, John McDonough has never been heard from again and likely won't be until he croaks.
Quenneville should carry even more of a burden of proof, given that he was one of the main drivers of the Hawks' silence and inertia, given that he was even more responsible for his own coaching staff than McDonough would have been, given the lack of any record of what he's done since he was punted out of the league, and given how much influence he wielded with the Hawks. Everyone involved is a villain, I can't stress that enough, but Quenneville and McDonough are the two biggest. Quenneville's burden of proof to be let back in the league should be the highest, and it should have been insurmountable.
The second point is I still have no idea what the NHL gets out of letting Quenneville back in to the league. There are probably legal possibilities that I don't know about, and I guess you could step-ladder an argument that basically amounts to "what about this guy?" Kevin Chevyldayoff is still in the league. Norm MacIver was re-hired by Kyle Davidson. Bowman got a job eventually. I don't know if that's grounds for a lawsuit from Quenneville, but I'm fairly sure the possibility was there, however remote. Again, squinting, I could see where the NHL wanted to avoid even the faintest possibility of that and just hoped their teams would take the lead and never hire him. They obviously should know better, but it's one thing to actively ban a guy and what that could entail and just having 32 GMs use a disqualifying event in the hiring process. Sadly, there aren't 32 GMs who think Quenneville's past is a disqualifying event, and there's little the NHL can do about that, if a lawsuit was any kind of possibility.
That still seems pretty flimsy. This isn't a star player who boosts ratings and ticket sales. Though I suppose I can't dismiss the possibility that the league wouldn't exactly mind the macabre boost in the Ducks ratings and attendance and following that we know will now ensue. But the NHL would have hummed along fine without Quenneville reappearing, and he's not even someone fans had to think about, except when teams would be rumored to be talking to him about their head coaching vacancy. If no team talked to him or even whispered about him, there would not be some movement to get him back into the league. He would have just faded away. He kind of already did.
What the Ducks get out of making this move, that's not as clear as Quenneville-apologists would like to think, either (and again, this is the least important facet of all this). We always joke on the podcast that in the NHL, if you get one job you get 17. That's doubly true for any coach or exec who has won the Cup. Quenneville's record outside of Chicago is good, but hardly unprecedented. We know what he thinks about young players (unless they're Trevor van Riemsdyk), and he's never helmed a rebuilding team. There's more than enough here to go terribly wrong just on the ice. While Quenneville has always been a good coach, there aren't four Hall of Famers waiting for him in Anaheim. He very well could have been a product of that time and that roster.
There's also the question of what the young players think of him. It is most likely that they are mostly unaware of the Kyle Beach saga, and they are under no obligation to know about it. These players were busy with their own careers and working to get to the NHL or just making their way into it. Athletes at this level are famously focused and tunnel-visioned.
However, that didn't save Mike Babcock, whose dinosaur ways got him canned in Columbus before he even coached a game, because the young players on the Jackets didn't want any part of it. It would only take one or two important young players to not fully buy in because they simply don't trust Quenneville to turn the whole thing against him. I mean it's hockey, it's completely believable to see a scenario where GM Pat Verbeek chooses Quenneville over Leo Carlsson or something. It would just be galatically stupid. Either way, it's the least likely scenario.
The whole thing, the Ducks hiring Quenneville portion, just seems so pointless. Maybe it's a few more points, but not enough to make the Ducks a contender. It's Anaheim, basically a NHL outpost, whether the leather-jacket clad Ducks fans like it or not. So it won't be as much noise as it could be. But it won't be noiseless. It certainly does nothing for the NHL's reputation and look, though I guess not nearly enough nothing to affect their bottom line. There's little proof that Quenneville is the guy for a rebuilding team. It's hiring a name with only little regard to fit.
Which leads one to believe that the only reason to do it is to do it, which feels nothing more than wholly disappointing. But it's the NHL and hockey, and we sign up for disappointment like this all the time.
-There was an urge to show up here today and eat all the crow after the Leafs, on the surface, have out-Panthers'd the Panthers in the first two games of their series to go up 2-0. Except...that's not really the case. The Cats doubled up the Leafs in attempts last night, and dominated the game.
But it is certainly enjoyable that the Panthers lost because their goalie got outplayed by the other team's goalie, when the other team's goalie is the backup forced into action because Florida intentionally injured the #1. Florida can point to the type of goals the Leafs scored, but Sergei Bobrovsky has a .820 SV% in two games so far in this series. There isn't some secret to this.
Bobrovsky is a very weird study. He was a weird study when the Panthers and Tallon handed him all the money. They've gotten two Final appearances and a Cup out of it, so no one can say it was a bad deal. He has two Vezinas, which are two Vezinas, but one was in the season-in-a-can of 2013. We remember his playoff collapses in Philly, He wasn't all that much better in Columbus in the postseason, until they upset the Lightning in that 2019 sweep, which conveniently was right before his free agency. Bob was only ok in the Panthers' run last spring, and was better in the one before.
What he is not, which his paycheck and reputation suggest, is a sure thing. Very few goalies are sure things in the postseason. Andrei Vasileskiy has two rings, but was also in net when the Bolts puked all over themselves against Bob's Jackets and wasn't all that great against Bob's Florida this time around. In fact. Vasilevskiy's last three forays into the playoffs are pretty stinky. You know the Connor Hellebuyck story by now. Is Jake Oettinger the surest thing? Igor Shesterkin? It's not a very long list.
-Mikko Rantanen is obviously on one right now. Whenever I see a stretch of dominance like this, I'm reminded of a clip of Bob Costas that plays during Moneyball during the portion of the movie that deals with their record winning-streak. In that clip, Costas says that even though the streak is certainly the result of great play, there is an unmistakable slice of randomness attached to it as well. The '27 Yankees never won more than nine in a row, for example. A lot of things have to come together that only come together simply due to randomness for a player to go on a streak like this. Plays that would normally be scattered over a longer stretch just crunch together. Like, say, having a deflection from the circle go top corner and then a pass hit a stick and go five-hole as a result. Those two things happen over the span of three games, it's still a hot streak, but it's not unprecedented.
Certainly, Rantanen is a great player in part due to his instincts, knowing where to be, and putting himself in a lot of positions where things can go right. If it were easy, everyone would do it. And this isn't to try and downplay or denigrate a unique performance. Hockey almost never sees one player take over a whole playoffs like this, and it's great to watch. The story behind it only makes it better. And randomness is fun! Perhaps that's the problem some people have with analytics, that it feels like it's always aimed at sucking the fun out of things. Sometimes it is. A lot of the time it is. But sometimes it's just there to point out how weird something is, how unpredictable.
Another footy thing from Fansided, on the Inter-Barca what-have-ya: https://fansided.com/barcelona-hit-gas-ignored-brakes-flew-off-the-cliff-vs-inter-milan
