Calgary Flames Make Right Decision In Firing Bob Hartley
By Devon Burke
The Calgary Flames have fired head coach Bob Hartley, and it was the right call to make for the organization.
The Calgary Flames have had a disappointing season, no mistake about it. Yet it may have caught many off-guard when it was announced Tuesday morning that head coach Bob Hartley and assistant coach Jacques Cloutier would not be returning for a fifth season of hockey. After all, one year prior Hartley guided the Flames into the second round of the playoffs for the first time since the magical cup-run in 2004, en route to winning the Jack Adams as the best coach of the year.
So why fire him?
Something people tend to forget is that Hartley has been a coach for the Flames for four seasons, and in those four seasons he has only made the playoffs once with a combined record of 134-135-25. Not bad numbers for a rebuilding club, but certainly not excellent numbers either.
The fact is that Hartley is a short-term coach who can get the most out of a lacklustre team and entrench a strong work ethic to a club. He has done just that in Calgary. Give credit to the man, he had the Flames out-working most teams on a consistent basis for most of his tenure with the club, and managed to get a mediocre hockey club into the playoffs in 2015 and actually win a round.
But he has a shelf-life.
Everywhere Hartley goes, he creates a culture of hard-work and thusly is able to get a lot out of his teams, but there is a reason why he has been fired twice before. His message wears thin, and in order to implement a hard-working culture you have to be very hard on your players.
Since he is such a hard coach, it is very difficult for him to have longevity in the NHL. Players get tired of hearing the same message, and motivating players the same way can eventually stop working, like it did this year. The Flames lost their identity of a hard-working club this season, as other teams frequently out-battled the Flames. It had become obvious the players were no longer responding to his style of coaching, evidenced by a 26th place finish this year.
But it wasn’t just that Harley’s message had started to wear thin, the Flames were disturbingly last in a number of categories include special teams. The mark of a good coach is having efficient special teams, and the fact that the Flames were so abysmal on the power-play and penalty kill was another nail in the coffin for Bob Hartley.
You can’t have the 22nd best power play, and 30th penalty kill in the league and expect to have success. Sure, the players obviously have to shoulder the load for this incompetence as well, but the fact that Calgary dedicated most of their practice’s throughout the season to fixing their special teams and still couldn’t get it together shows that perhaps it was the teacher more than the student’s fault.
Player usage was also something Hartley struggled with all year. Dennis Wideman, Joe Colborne, and even Mason Raymond received lots of power-play time earlier on in the season, instead of players like Dougie Hamilton or Sam Bennett. The fact that it took him so long to change up what obviously wasn’t working showed a stubbornness that Hartley exudes in his coaching.
Hartley has stated on numerous occasions that the Flames don’t really have to prepare for other teams because they play the same way every game. Coaches need to be flexible enough to make adjustments to their game to fit the certain ebbs and flows of a season.
Which bring me to the biggest reason why Hartley was let go, systems. Hartley was too reliant on the stretch pass this season, and teams picked up on it this year. By simply adjusting their games, the opposition could clog up the neutral zone and force Calgary to make bad passes, evidenced by Calgary’s icing the puck more than a baker ice’s a cake.
Related Story: 5 Reasons Why The Flames Struggled This Year
Hartley also has failed to employ a structure defensively as the Flames finished dead last in goals allowed. Sure Brad Treliving shoulders a lot of the blame on this one as he somehow thought bringing in three goalies on one-way contracts would be prudent to success, it wasn’t.
The players certainly didn’t do any favours for Hartley either by being as inconsistent as Jeykll and Hyde, and under-performing for most of the season. It also wasn’t Hartley’s fault that Jonas Hiller played his way out of the NHL, and that Calgary never got consistent goaltending from anyone.
But the fact remains that Calgary gave up way too many high-quality scoring chances, and tweaking his system to allow for more puck-possesion could have allowed Calgary to spend less time defending. This would’ve meant less chances against, and less time seeing Jonas Hiller get lit-up like a christmas tree.
Despite all this, you have to give credit to Bob for bringing the best out of players like Johnny Gaudreau, Sean Monahan, Mikael Backlund, Mark Giordano, and T.J. Brodie. Bob has instilled a great culture on which to build upon, something flames fans should be forever grateful for.
Most impressive about Bob’s tenure was last year’s magical playoff run, which ignited a city and fanbase. The playoff run, and particularly the series against Vancouver, was the best hockey the Flames have played in over a decade.
However, it is time for a change. Hartley has taken the Flames as far as he can, now it is time for a new coach to build upon the successes and improve some of the failures that Bob Hartley will leave behind. Even if Bob wasn’t the guy to deliver a Stanley Cup to the Flames, I am grateful to him for bringing back exciting hockey, and of course playoff hockey, to the city of Calgary.
Now if Brad Treliving can hire a coach who is good with young players, plays an up-tempo style, employs solid defensive structure, and can improve the special teams, the Flames will truly be set for sustainable winning. He will have his work cut-out for him, and despite losing a good coach in Hartley, it was a decision that needed to be made.
Regardless of how tough it was.