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Brian Burke knows something about midseason coaching changes. Not surprisingly, he has his opinion on them.
He doesn't like them. He doesn't think they work. In almost two on-again, off-again decades as an NHL general manager, he's made just the one — replacing Mike Keenan with Marc Crawford during the 1998-99 season with the Vancouver Canucks.
But the Anaheim Ducks' GM also suspects this: The move the Ottawa Senators made this week to replace John Paddock with Bryan Murray will almost certainly pay dividends for a team listing badly at the moment.
"If you look at the last 20 coaching changes and check the records before and after, unless it's coupled with some player movement, they don't do a lot," Burke said on Thursday.
Next week, the Ottawa Senators will meet the Anaheim Ducks in a rematch of last year’s Stanley Cup. But they are going in opposite directions now. The Senators started this season red-hot, but are fading fast down the stretch. The Ducks, on the other hand, are coming out of hibernation at the right time. (AP Photo/Tom Mihalek)
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"Having said that, my prediction is: This one [Ottawa's] is likely to make a difference. For one thing, the coach is also the GM, so he has not only the whip, but also the hat and the chair, too. For another, Bryan Murray is a hell of a bench coach.
"John Paddock is a dear friend of mine — we played together in the American Hockey League and I'm sick about what happened to him. But this is one time where a coaching change may bear instant fruit."
But not too soon. The Ducks will meet the Senators on Monday night in Anaheim for the first time since they finished off Ottawa in a five-game Stanley Cup final just more than eight months ago. The two teams are at a crossroad of sorts as the NHL heads into its stretch drive. Their records are virtually identical — Ottawa with 78 points from 65 games, and the Ducks with 79 points from 66 games. In a season of unprecedented parity, both are comfortably in the playoff mix.
But the similarities end there. After a 15-2 start, the Senators are in a free fall, including back-to-back shutout losses to the Toronto Maple Leafs and Boston Bruins on Monday and Tuesday, respectively. The next day, Murray fired Paddock and went back behind the bench. The Senators lost again, 3-1 in Philadelphia on Thursday.
After a 6-8-3 start in a similar number of games, the Ducks have been on a major upswing. Since the middle of December, when Scott Niedermayer returned to the lineup after reneging on his retirement plans, the reigning champions are 21-9-3. And they went on a 9-1 tear since Teemu Selanne ended his short-lived retirement in early February.
The Ducks endured all sorts of early-season issues, suffering from an acute case of Stanley Cup hangover as they stumbled out of the gate. They started the season on an ungodly five-game trip, which opened in London. Then they were the feature attraction for the home openers of the Detroit Red Wings, Columbus Blue Jackets and Pittsburgh Penguins.
Besides not having Niedermayer and Selanne, they were also missing Dustin Penner, who signed last summer for big dollars with the Edmonton Oilers as a restricted free agent. A handful of players, including goaltender Jean-Sébastien Giguère and defensive stalwart Sami Pahlsson, were recovering from off-season surgeries.
Despite the emergence of two of their youngsters up front, Ryan Getzlaf and Corey Perry, the Ducks were a comparatively goal-starved team. Burke was publicly trading barbs with his Oilers counterpart, Kevin Lowe, all the while trying to show patience in his team, knowing there was no clear-cut blueprint of how to deal with trying to defend the Stanley Cup.
In the meantime, all seemed well in the Senators' world. With Paddock in charge on the bench and Murray in the GM's job, they raced out to an early lead in the Eastern Conference. The big line of Jason Spezza, Dany Heatley and Daniel Alfredsson was producing points at its usual productive pace. Mike Fisher was developing nicely into a strong No.2 centre. And even if goaltender Ray Emery was causing some grief because of punctuality issues, Martin Gerber was providing their high-octane squad with steady-enough goaltending.
While their opponents in the Eastern Conference were stutter-stepping along, the Senators were steamrolling toward the Presidents' Trophy as the NHL's top team during the regular season.
Now?
