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Updates on Dineen and Eakins |
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Most of the top candidates to fill NHL head coaching vacancies during the off-season -- including the most sought-after name out there, Mike Babcock -- are now free to talk to interested teams. Their ranks may grow if Dave Tippett opts out in Arizona or if Claude Julien is not brought back by the Bruins' next general manager.
One hot candidate that many teams would like to speak to is Kevin Dineen. However, as an assistant coach on a Chicago Blackhawks team that is headed to the Western Conference Finals and possibly the Stanley Cup Final, Dineen has to focus on his current job. Teams won't ask the Hawks for permission to speak to Dineen until after the team is done in the playoffs, by which time some of the vacancies could already be filled.
The consensus I've heard on Dineen is that he did a very underrated job in leading the Florida Panthers to overachieve their way to a division championship and, thereafter, was pretty much given a raw deal with a roster that would have taken a miracle worker to coax to a winning record. He helped his cause by coaching the Canadian women's team to a gold medal -- despite having never coached women's hockey before -- at the Olympics. He also built a good reputation for himself before his Panthers tenure for his AHL work in Portland.
Furthermore, the entire Dineen family has cache in the hockey business and a lot of folks are pulling for Kevin to get his next shot as an NHL head coach sooner rather than later. It will be interesting to see if the Hawks' deep playoff run is actually a short-term roadblock but, in the long run, I fully expect to see Dineen behind an NHL bench as the head coach in the relatively near future.
One of the names that was tied to being a candidate for the Philadelphia vacancy was former Oilers and Marlies head coach Dallas Eakins. However, it seems like this was more a case of simple due diligence that got blown up into a bigger story.
An NHL front office person said of Eakins that there's a perception around many teams that he is a little too fast to reveal things to the media that teams prefer to keep in-house; and this is something that is perhaps an even bigger obstacle to landing his next NHL head coaching gig than the Oilers' record during his tenure in Edmonton.
I don't know how many teams around the league view Eakins in that light, but I do know more and more GMs are trying to reign in what coaches can and can't reveal and many teams now prohibit assistant coaches from speaking to the media at all. As such, a perception of being a little too free with information and glib quotes definitely can work against a coaching candidate's chances.
Most of all, though, it shows how fast things change in hockey. Wasn't all that long ago that Eakins was considered the "next great NHL coach" and Dineen was "just another name" on the scene. A few years later, Dineen's chances of getting a second head coaching gig in the NHL appear to be much higher in the near future than Eakins.
Personally, I think both guys deserve another shot.
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