A bit of interesting news:
The Blues fired coach Drew Bannister and hired Jim Montgomery as his replacement just five days after the 2022 Jack Adams Award winner was let go by the Bruins.
www.espn.com
/../ that puts a seasoned coach in charge of shepherding St. Louis through a retooling period and into the potential re-opening of the organization's Stanley Cup-contending window.
Sounds familiar? Yep. They supposedly want to shake things up for obvious reasons - their prospect pool lacks top-end talent and their team is getting a bit old and is very unspectacular.
Their reputable, Cup-winning-pedigree GM Doug Armstrong (not Rob the nepotistical rookie) decided a retool will be enough.
Now he just made a move to replace a struggling novice coach (Stevens...khm, Bannister) with a more experienced and regular-season-only-proven coach (McLellan...khm, Montgomery).
Wait, where's Willie here?
For the Kings, Rob hired a random old coach with no proven record in Willie Desjardins after novice HC Stevens struggled with the team. A move that screamed to me "intentional sabotage of the team" in order to kickstart a proper retool period of multiple years. OR...would Rob hire Todd if Todd was fired 1 month sooner? Would the Kings perform considerably better with Todd instead of Willie and thus be in a complete mediocrity black hole by now? One has to wonder...
Anyways...with the Blues it seems Doug managed to hire a coach that will make the team perform better, not worse, sooner that Rob did, thus possibly making their retool last for barely 1 season (23rd two seasons ago).
Do you think they are going to go into a firesale now? Will they wait until deadline to see how they do with the new coach? It seems curious to me that they decided for this kind of approach, since they have no merch and ticket-selling superstars like the Kings had with AK, DD and JQ when it was time to decide how to move forward. Their top-end talent that isn't old is also locked up long-term, so it's not like they could get disgruntled with a couple of seasons of bottom dwelling and pack their bags in the offseason.
It will be interesting to see how it pans out for them...to me it seems Doug took a similar approach to Rob, but he will half-@ss it even more.
Thoughts?