No More Love for Laviolette?
by Bob Wage on Jun 30, 2009 11:28 AM EDT
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Less than four years ago, Peter Laviolette was on top of the coaching world. He was head coach for Team USA in the 2006 Olympics, then went on to coach the Carolina Hurricanes to a Stanley Cup. Now, he is unemployed and just got passed over for an assistant coaching position for next year's Olympics.
Ron Wilson was named head coach awhile ago, but yesterday John Tortorella and Scott Gordon were named assistants. While Laviolette is the second most winningest American born coach in NHL history, (just behind Tortorella), he seems to bring a bit of baggage with him that teams are now shying away from. He has been passed over for several NHL jobs since his dismissal from the Canes, and now with this snub, it makes one wonder how much of a commodity he is anymore.
Could he be heading in the direction of Ted Nolan, a coach who is known as someone who can achieve results in the short term, but who has trouble getting along with management as well as some players? There was certainly trouble in paradise in 2006 as Mike Modano, Bill Guerin, and a couple of the other American players seemed to be rubbed the wrong way by Lavi. Perhaps Team USA wanted to avoid any drama this time around?
The coach is still under contract by the Canes and is earning a reported, one million annually.
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Hi!
Hi Bubba, it’s Sunny! (if you remember an original Canes Country reader back in the day! : -) ) It’s been a while! I’d been having problems commenting a long time ago, then never got around to figuring it out. So I decided to just re-register. Fascinating reading, I know…
Anyway…! I had similar thoughts about Lavi when I saw this. It seems to me that about 1 year is the window NHL coaches have to find another job before people start to “forget” about them. it seems the quicker they’re hired the better, like Tortorella, Ron Wilson, Joel Quenneville, Claude Julien (more than once!), Tom Renney, etc. But then you’ve got guys like Bob Hartley, Terry Murray, Marc Crawford, Pat Quinn, Craig Hartsburg, etc who went years before getting another coaching job or still haven’t gotten one, at least in the NHL. Now like you said it could be there is a Ted Nolan thing going on in Lavi’s case. I hope not. I was hoping he’d get the Wild coaching job, I can see him fitting in really well there.
One last thing: I remember when Scott Gordon was announced as an assistant coach on Team USA, b/c it was the day after the Islanders got waxed 9-0 by the Canes. Beautiful timing!
lavi’s a good guy, very active in his church (which is my church too) and a good coach. however, i think there’s an ego thing there that players with egos hit up against, and once you’ve got an owner (karamanos) bad-mouthing lavi in public that sends up flags to other owners. until there’s a gm lavi is friends with in a position of power (atlanta) he won’t get the call. likely a mid-season fill-in for some team in transition.
Lets Think About It
OK we all know the GM’s have their own little gossip/discussion world going between a lot of them so if you think about it, the word is out “you don’t want Lavi coaching your team”. I wish him well, I’m just glad he’s no longer on our bench in the RBC.
C
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