There’s a lot of reasons to be feeling, hmmm… if a picture’s worth a thousand words, then who knows what a video is ...a lot of reasons to be down, including the garbage world of hockey.
But this is a place for joy, not for shredding Marc Staal (his dipshit bigot-using-religion-for-cover brother Eric, too, but especially Marc because of all the years he spent in New York, including when I (hi, it’s Jesse if you’re new here — Andrew and Roger have nothing to do with these “show notes”) covered the Rangers for the Daily News.
So, we’ll put that aside and dive into a question raised by Ryan Lambert and Sean McIndoe on the latest Puck Soup.
In December of 2016, the Blues fired Mike Keenan, and replaced him with Joel Quenneville. In between, interim coach Jimmy Roberts got nine games behind St. Louis’ bench, going 3-3-3.
Between them, Keenan (672) and Quenneville (969) have won 1,641 games as NHL coaches. So, does Roberts hold the very niche record of Interim Coach Between The Pair Of Coaches With the Most Wins?
This isn’t super hard to figure out. Quenneville is second on the NHL’s all-time wins list, behind only Scotty Bowman. Keenan is 15th. You might figure this out a different way, and that’s cool, but here’s my process: go through the top coaches until you reach a place where you can’t get a combo adding up to more than 1,641, and Roberts has the record — or someone else has a bigger number before you get to that point. For clarity’s sake, we’ll call an interim coach one who does not finish out the season.
Bowman himself was never replaced by, nor replaced, an interim coach as such. Bowman’s career reads funny because he coached the Sabres in 1979-80, then for 35 games in 1981-82, then for the next three full seasons, plus 37 games in 1985-86 and 12 more in 1986-87 — because Bowman was also GM in Buffalo and stepping behind the bench himself sometimes.
Quenneville got the ax in St. Louis in 2004, replaced by Mike Kitchen on a full-time basis, so no worries there. Same with Jeremy Colliton, while Andrew Brunette finished out last season in Florida before the Panthers turned to Paul Maurice.
Barry Trotz (914 wins): Never fired in-season.
Ken Hitchcock (849), Lindy Ruff (827): Part of in-season coaching changes, but never with a team that had a true interim in the mix.
Paul Maurice (811): The 2004 Hurricanes — hey, that’s shit-for-brains Eric Staal’s rookie year, and he was teammates with Ron Francis and Artūrs Irbe, which is excellent to keep in mind for your Six Degrees Of… hockey games! — went straight to Peter Laviolette, who has 751 career wins and counting, and with Maurice also being active, they’re at 1,562 wins and counting, which is… not a record for combined career wins by the coaches of one team in a single season, because you’ve not only got those 1,641 career wins for Keenan and Quenneville with the 1996-97 Blues, but also Roberts’ 50 (three with those Blues, 21 for the Bowman-run 1981-82 Sabres, and 26 in his one full season as coach, with the 1991-92 Hartford Whalers). Stay tuned?
Al Arbour (782): One of those wins was actually as an interim coach, when Arbour got what amounted to a testimonial match with the Islanders. He’s officially listed that season as the coach between Ted Nolan and Ted Nolan again.
And it wouldn’t matter if Al Arbour had coached between Al Arbour and Al Arbour, because 782+782=1,564, and that’s less than 1,641. No two coaches on this list can combine to get there, and while Darryl Sutter and John Tortorella (sort of, but congrats on win number 700, man, hope you’re real proud of Staalsie today, too) remain active with 700-plus wins, Roberts, who died in 2015, remains the voice between the two biggest voices, as far as NHL history is concerned.
It’s a garage league full of spineless dweebs, but the history is interesting.
We Can Pod It Out 75: If I Needed Someone