Sportsnet: Elliotte Friedman and Kyle Bukaukas on the 32 Thoughts: The Podcast – Hurtin’ for Hagens episode talking about the coaching hot seat. The first firing last season was one year ago from Tuesday, and things could be heating up for some coaches.
** NHLRumors.com transcription
Bukauskas: “So on Tuesday, Elliotte, it will be one year since the Oilers fired Jay Woodcroft. Replacement with Kris Knoblach, and we all know where the Edmonton Oilers went from there.
That was the first coaching change in the NHL last season, and we seem to be at the point of the year already where we are past the, ‘It’s early stage.’ And for some markets there’s starting to be that sense of we may be in trouble stage.
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I’m not asking if you think there’s any change on the horizon anywhere, but is there some chatter starting around some names, coaches that aren’t currently working in the NHL.
Friedman: “I think it’s starting to happen. I think there’s a few teams starting to look around and say, ‘okay, you know, is there someone else that we want to look at here?’
People are being very careful about what particular situations. But I had a few notes when I woke up on Sunday morning about, teams are starting to look around. Know, I think there’s, I think there’s some teams potentially considering Joel Quenneville or Todd McClellan, or even, like, if someone gets fired, in place ‘A’ would there be interested in them in place ‘B’. I think that’s starting to heat up around here.
You can sense it’s, and the other thing too is, like a lot of the managers are going to be in Toronto over the next few days, because the GM meetings are on Tuesday morning. And whenever they’re together, the talk always picks up, whether it’s about player movement or things like that.
You know, I, I just feel that, I’ve got a number of people just telling me that the chatter is starting to pick up. Like you try to give your teams a month sort themselves out if they’re really struggling. And I think that we’re kind of getting there in a couple of these situations, we’ll see.
Like again, people are people are always careful about saying where because I think they’re sensitive. Like coaches know, right? Like they know when it’s real and they know when it’s not real, and they try not to pour gasoline on the fire. But it’s, it’s out there. You can, you can really feel it.
And I, I think, I think Quenneville’s and McClellan’s names, I think are among the names that are, you know, people are starting to talk about.
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I’m sure there’s more like, like for and again, I don’t know what Boston is going to do here. I don’t know if anything, but I think even if Boston made a change, I think a guy like Jim Montgomery would be a candidate in some other places. So I think that, and I don’t know what the Bruins are going to do. When they were in town last week, Don Sweeney wasn’t letting me know his secrets. So you know, we’ll see. we’ll see what’s up. But you, you can definitely feel it picking up.