Same-Day Analysis: Colliton never had a chance
The Blackhawks picked a young, inexperienced coach to guide a roster that lacked NHL depth. That's usually a recipe for failure
It should come as no surprise that Jeremy Colliton was fired, for a couple of reasons. First, he doesn’t have the new-car smell and ridiculously low expectations of Andre Tourigny in Arizona. Second, the Blackhawks are the 31st-best team in a 32-team league, they have one win in 12 games and Marc-Andre Fleury has gone from looking like the happiest guy in the world to a guy who wants to kill someone every time somebody scores on him.
Most of all, however, Jeremy Colliton never, ever had a chance. In an ideal world, the Blackhawks would have preferred to not have to fire their coach so soon after dealing with the fallout from the worst scandal in team history. But then again, is there really any difference between a tire fire where the flames are 10 feet high or 15 feet high? The black hole from which this franchise has to emerge really isn’t any deeper today now that Colliton has been fired. It just means that an organization that is in disarray both on and off the ice is now in disarray both on and off the ice without a permanent head coach.
(Not to mention the symmetry of it all. Colliton originally took the job Nov. 6, 2018, three years to the day before he was fired.)
And when the Blackhawk players respond to their coach the way they have the past couple of games, you really have no choice. After picking up their first win of the season Monday night with a 5-1 win over the Ottawa Senators, the Blackhawks were hoping to build on that momentum and they did for two periods, turning a 3-1 lead into a 4-3 loss to the undefeated Carolina Hurricanes two nights later. Against the Winnipeg Jets Friday night, things started out badly and got worse.
In reality, Colliton’s firing was a function of how the Blackhawks have built their roster more than the residual effect of all the bad karma that surrounds them at the moment. The Blackhawks won their most recent Stanley Cup six years ago, then spent the next couple of years in a desperate attempt to remain a contender. Right now, they are actually right about where they should be in their cycle. When you bottom out the way the Blackhawks have and the Pittsburgh Penguins soon will, there are no quick ways out of it.
And there are really no quick ways out of it when you fire Joel Quenneville and replace him with a 33-year-old who has a year-and-a-half of experience in the American Hockey League on his resume (along with three-plus seasons in the Allsvenskan, the second-tier pro league in Sweden). You don’t do it by being half-in and half-out of a rebuild. The Blackhawks chose 48 players in the draft from 2014 through 2019 and the only true NHL players they’ve seen so far out of that haul were Nick Schmaltz, Alex DeBrincat, Henri Jokiharju, Adam Boqvist, Philipp Kurashev and Kirby Dach. They’ve spent much of their time in salary cap hell, as most teams do when they win Stanley Cups, and the highly touted acquisitions – Fleury and defenseman Seth Jones and Jake McCabe – have had more rocky moments than good ones. Jonathan Toews, coming off a missed season, has one goal.
This is not a good team. It hasn’t been one for a long time. It won’t be for a long time, either. The off-ice tumult could make it difficult for them to attract quality candidates to run their hockey operations department and, even if they do, it will be a good number of years before the Blackhawks can build their roster and prospect pool into one that can compete at the NHL level.
A lot of people who follow this team closely will claim Colliton contributed to his own demise and there is certainly some truth to that. Perhaps his three years in Sweden instilled in him a mentality to have his teams play not-to-lose instead of exploiting their talents and playing a more offensive style. The Blackhawks may have thought they were getting the next Jon Cooper, but that wasn’t the case. Cooper had experience at every level and, more importantly, a string of championships in his wake, including one at the AHL level. (In the interest of fairness, Colliton did lead the Rockford IceHogs to the conference final in his only season behind the bench.)
But it probably wouldn’t have made much of a difference. The Blackhawks are in the painful part of the rebuilding cycle and they’re going to remain there for whomever replaces him.