Fantasy Impact: The Edmonton Oilers have fired their head coach, Dallas Eakins. Craig MacTavish will take over as coach for now.
The Oilers get: another coaching search underway. Eakins had his team cut down on shots against this season and they seemed to play with a little more responsibility versus last year. But that’s not exactly hard to do, given how horrible they were last year. But the two goaltenders Eakins was given have been unable to stop even 90% of the shots they faced. That part of the blame cannot be laid completely on Eakins shoulders. After all – he had the team cutting down on shots faced. The goalies need to take it from there.
On the positive side, we’ve seen this before. The Penguins were expected to win after a lengthy rebuild and they couldn’t get over the top. Then Ed Olczyk was fired and Michel Therrien came in and the wins started coming. The Blackhawks – Denis Savard was fired and Joel Quenneville came in. The Capitals – Glen Hanlon then Bruce Boudreau. If this is another case of a midseason firing of the coach of a young team that should be doing better, then history suggests that this could be a catalyst for something great.
The Penguins went through three coaches in three years starting with Rick Kehoe and moving onto Eddie Olczyk and then Therrien. The Blackhawks fired eight coaches in 10 years (Hartsburg, Graham, Molleken, Pulford, Suhonen, Sutter, Yawney, Savard) before Joel Quenneville. In both cases, the term “Mickey Mouse” was mentioned by many pundits. Sports are indeed cyclic.
The Oilers also brought up AHL coach Todd Nelson to be an assistant, with the theory that he could help with some of the younger players (s/t to Laidlaw in the comments).
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