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For a team known for employing a progressive approach, the Vegas Golden Knights sure appear to have made an out-of-character move with the biggest personnel change in the franchise's three-year history.
At best, Wednesday’s firing of coach Gerard Gallant, and by extension, the hiring of former San Jose Sharks coach Peter DeBoer, was a panicked, short-sighted prayer. At worst, it was a rash, franchise-derailing folly.
“It’s hard to put into words unless you’ve done these jobs but it’s more the feeling you have that a change might be needed,” Golden Knights general manager Kelly McCrimmon said. “I wish I could be more specific than that but that’s really how we felt.”
Feel. That’s the word McCrimmon kept returning to during a brief, five-minute address to a small group of media Wednesday morning in Ottawa where the Golden Knights practiced ahead of tonight’s game against the Senators.
Feel? Really? An organization that’s been among the most successful in the NHL over the last three seasons is going to let momentary emotion dictate the future of their team over, who knows, say, a large sample of logic and reason?
Make no mistake: Logic and reason would indicate a head-coaching change is not what was needed to break the Golden Knights’ out of a rut that currently has them ever-so-slightly outside of the playoffs.
Vegas’ 24-19-6 record, and four-game losing streak, is alarming and far below expectations. But we’re talking about a front office known as one of the most analytically savvy in hockey.
A front office that immediately went all-in on the new age of hockey including valuing fast skating and shot quantity instead of more inefficient strategies that still dominated the NHL going into the Golden Knights’ expansion season. A front office that understands the fickle nature of hockey and, therefore, the fact that there are far better predictive measures than win-loss record going forward.
Said predictive measures unanimously signify better days are ahead for the Golden Knights. Vegas is second in the league in expected-goals percentage and fourth-to-last in PDO (shooting percentage-plus-save percentage).
Anyone who argues that Vegas isn’t a Stanley Cup contender has also obviously failed to consult the most telling measure — the betting market. True, the odds locally might be slanted given the fanbase’s long-running fascination of betting with their hearts, so throw out Las Vegas sports books.
The sports book taking the biggest, sharpest action in the world, BetCris, lists Golden Knights at 12-to-1 future odds — the seventh lowest price in the league.
Gallant simply wasn’t in a fire-able position from a hockey perspective, and yet McCrimmon stressed this was purely a hockey decision and nothing more.
That can’t be true. There’s got to be more.
Gallant was notoriously prickly to deal with after some losses, and even some victories if his misguided outburst after a win over the Flyers two weeks ago — his penultimate victory in Vegas, turns out — can be used as evidence. It seems unlikely, but maybe Gallant’s grouchiness, if not the same “strong opinions” he cited as the reason for the Florida Panthers firing him in 2017, soiled his relationship with McCrimmon and President of Hockey Operations George McPhee.
McCrimmon gave no indication that was the case, but he didn’t give much of an indication of anything. He couldn’t fully get his story straight and noticeably contradicted himself in a video of his media availability posted to the Golden Knights’ twitter account.
“We thought about this a lot,” McCrimmon said as part of his opening statement. “It certainly wasn’t something we did in haste or something we did based on the recent four games. It was a decision we arrived at over time.”
But when the subject turned to DeBoer and whether his availability had anything to do with parting ways with Gallant, McCrimmon changed his tune.
“This is all in the last 24 hours that any of this has gone on,” he said, “so it’s happened very quickly.”
Despite McCrimmon’s denials, an infatuation with DeBoer makes more sense than a sudden fallout with Gallant on the surface. Upon taking the San Jose job five years ago, DeBoer spoke ardently about embracing the types of analytics McPhee is often associated with — he’s certainly a more outspoken advocate of advanced statistics than Gallant.
DeBoer has also taken two different teams, the Sharks and the New Jersey Devils, to the Stanley Cup Final in his first season on the bench. He has a reputation for bringing the best out of offensively gifted teams with mediocre goaltending — a profile the Golden Knights fit into this season.
Marc-Andre Fleury is mired in struggles but there’s no reason the Golden Knights’ group of forwards shouldn’t be able to pick up the slack and score at a higher clip. They’re currently 13th in the league with 148 goals, which is too low given their collective talent level.
Of course, all of this borders on reckless speculation. But there’s not much other choice after the team acted, well, recklessly in dispatching Gallant without providing any real insight into their thought process.
DeBoer is set up for success with this team and it wouldn’t be that much of a surprise if he led the Golden Knights to their second Pacific Division, and even Western Conference, championship. But there’s no reason to believe Gallant couldn’t have done the same.
There’s no reason to believe Gallant deserved this fate.
Case Keefer can be reached at 702-948-2790 or [email protected]. Follow Case on Twitter at twitter.com/casekeefer.
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