In the summer of 2003 the New York Islanders fired Peter Laviolette, even though he had coached the team – which before his arrival had missed the play-offs for seven successive seasons – to consecutive post-season berths.
“Just making the play-offs is not good enough,” the team’s general manager, Mike Milbury, explained.
After that brilliant move by Milbury the Isles began a slow decline, missing the play-offs in six of the next eight seasons.
The lesson in this is relevant as the play-offs approach. Coaches tend to be judged by whether their team did better this year than last year. That makes sense, in a way, but it is also a formula for dismissing a good coach because long-term progress is not a straight-line thing. There will be ups and downs but if you believe in your people you have to be willing to stick it out.
For the Isles, there is a twist to this story.
The coach they hired to replace Laviolette, Steve Stirling, did not do especially well. But as his assistants he did hire two men, Dan Bylsma and Jack Capuano, who would go on to become head coaches in the NHL.
Bylsma guided the Pittsburgh Penguins to the Stanley Cup in 2009.
Capuano is the coach of the best Islanders team in 30 years.
And Stirling? At age 64, he is an assistant coach with the Binghamton Senators in the minor leagues. But at least give him credit for hiring well. As he told the New York newspaper Newsday in 2013: “If you’re a person in authority, you should always hire people who are smarter than you.”
Whoever hired Mike Milbury must have been pretty dim.
rmckenzie@thenational.ae
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