Joel Quenneville has never needed much time to land on his feet.
Now 60, Quenneville has coached 1,636 NHL games over 22 seasons and has the second-most career wins of all time, behind Scotty Bowman. When he was fired by the Chicago Blackhawks on Tuesday, he was in the second year of a three-year contract extension worth a reported $6 million per season that was signed in January of 2016, half a season after he guided the Blackhawks to their third Stanley Cup in six years.
Before his 10-and-a-bit seasons in Chicago, Quenneville served as head coach of the St. Louis Blues and Colorado Avalanche. He never had to wait long between jobs.
After an 803-game playing career as a stay-at-home defenseman, the native of Windsor, Ontario eased into coaching as a player-assistant with the St. John’s Maple Leafs of the American Hockey League before returning to the NHL as an assistant with the Quebec Nordiques in 1994.
The Nordiques relocated to become the Colorado Avalanche in the fall of 1995. Quenneville earned his first Stanley Cup ring in June of 1996 as part of the Avalanche staff, then moved on to replace the fired Mike Keenan as head coach of the Blues on January 9, 1997.
In St. Louis, Quenneville put up a regular-season record of 307-191-77-18 and earned the Jack Adams Award as coach of the year when his team won the Presidents’ Trophy in 1999-2000. But the Blues only made it as far as the third round of the playoffs once in those seven seasons. Quenneville was fired on February 24, 2004, when the team was in danger of missing the playoffs for the first time in 25 years.
Four months later, Quenneville signed on to return to Colorado, this time as head coach. After the 2004-05 season was canceled due to the owners’ lockout, Quenneville led the Avalanche to a 131-92-23 regular-season record and two second-round playoff defeats over three seasons before parting ways with the team by mutual agreement at the end of the 2007-08 season.
That September, Quenneville signed on as a pro scout with the Blackhawks. He filled that role for barely a month before being tapped to replace fired head coach Denis Savard after Chicago started the 2008-09 season with a 1-2-1 record.
With a young roster that included sophomores Jonathan Toews and Patrick Kane along with other 25-and-under talents like Duncan Keith, Brent Seabrook, Niklas Hjalmarsson, Andrew Ladd and Dustin Byfuglien, the Blackhawks were on the verge of re-emerging after a 10-season stretch when they’d made the playoffs just once. In Quenneville’s first year at the helm, Chicago reached the conference final before falling to the defending champion Detroit Red Wings. One season later, they broke their franchise’s 49-year Stanley Cup drought.
The Blackhawks went on to win three Cups in six years under Quenneville, in the midst of constant pressure on general manager Stan Bowman to keep his roster full of young stars salary-cap compliant. Byfuglien and Ladd were among the players jettisoned after the 2010 win for cap reasons. Others would follow.
Despite the team’s success, tensions simmered between Bowman and Quenneville — most publicly when Quenneville refused to attend the first day of the 2017 draft in Chicago after Bowman dealt Hjalmarsson to the Arizona Coyotes. Two months earlier, Bowman had fired Quenneville’s assistant, Mike Kitchen, after Chicago’s first-round sweep at the hands of the Nashville Predators.
From that point on, questions swirled about Quenneville’s job security. He survived after the Blackhawks missed the playoffs in 2018 for the first time on his watch, but couldn’t withstand last week’s Western Canadian road trip, where the team was outscored 13-5 in consecutive losses to the Vancouver Canucks, Edmonton Oilers and Calgary Flames.
Quenneville is being replaced by 33-year-old Jeremy Colliton. He’s younger than current Blackhawks players Keith, Corey Crawford, Cam Ward and Chris Kunitz, but not the youngest coach ever in the NHL. Gary Green was 26 when he was hired by the Washington Capitals in 1979. He lasted just 155 games, but Paul Maurice has had a long, successful NHL career that is still going strong. He started with the Hartford Whalers at age 28 in 1995.
A second-round draft pick by the New York Islanders in 2003, Colliton posted three goals and three assists in 57 NHL games over five seasons. After finishing his playing career with Mora IK of Sweden’s Tier II Allsvenskan league in 2013, Colliton quickly transitioned to a head coaching role. He spent four seasons leading Mora before returning to North America to become head coach of the Blackhawks’ farm team, the Rockford IceHogs.
Under Colliton, the IceHogs improved by 26 points in the 2017-18 regular-season standings and reached the third round of the AHL playoffs for the first time in franchise history. The coach also successfully helped to develop under-the-radar prospects like Erik Gustafsson and John Hayden, who have become full-time NHLers for the Blackhawks this season.
By handing the reins directly to Colliton, the Blackhawks are taking a different approach than the Los Angeles Kings, who hired promising 40-year-old Marco Sturm as an assistant but handed their head-coaching job to 61-year-old Willie Desjardins, on an interim basis, after firing John Stevens on Sunday. General manager Rob Blake may be looking to eventually hand the head-coaching reins to Sturm, but is hedging his bet for now.
The Blackhawks and Kings still have core players on their rosters from their Stanley Cup years, but those players aren’t getting any younger. Both organizations have decided they can’t afford to waste any more time before a major shakeup.
Even over a grueling 82-game schedule, every point counts in today’s NHL. That's part of the reason why teams are making changes to try to find a spark so early in the year. Last season, the Florida Panthers missed out on the postseason by a single point in the Eastern Conference, while the St. Louis Blues came out on the wrong end of a final-game win-and-get-in showdown against the Colorado Avalanche in the West. One year earlier, two teams in the East missed the postseason by a single point — the New York Islanders and the Tampa Bay Lightning.
For now, all 31 teams are still alive this season. In the West, the last-place Kings are six points out of the second wild-card spot after kicking off the Desjardins era with a 4-1 win over their arch-rivals from Anaheim on Tuesday. In the East, the last-place Florida Panthers are seven points out — but have played at least two fewer games than every other team in the league.
With his record of success and the respect he garners from his players, Quenneville’s availability could trigger more changes elsewhere in the league.
Two questions would need to be answered before he takes a new job:
- Does Quenneville want the pressure of trying to shepherd a turnaround for an underperforming team?
- If he does, how is his compensation going to work?
It seems unlikely that Quenneville would walk away from what’s left of the hefty $6 million a season that he’d get by not working over the next two years to sign for less money with another team. The Blackhawks could save themselves some of that payout by carrying a portion if he signed a somewhat smaller ticket elsewhere. Still, it's impossible to imagine they'd facilitate a move like that with a division rival like, say, the St. Louis Blues — where current coach Mike Yeo has been said to be on the hot seat as his team languishes in last place in the Central Division, even after Monday’s 4-1 win over the Carolina Hurricanes.
If Quenneville is interested in a new challenge, the Blackhawks would probably be much more amenable to setting him up on an Eastern Conference team, where they’d only see him twice a year unless they meet in the Stanley Cup Final. Could the talent-rich but underperforming Florida Panthers be a fit?
Stay tuned. After no NHL coach lost his job during the 2017-18 season, it looks like organizations could be making up for lost time this year.
