NHL Coaches Have Been On Thin Ice All Season
Being a head coach in any professional sport is a good way to experience meager job security. But even relative to coaches in other sports, hockey's bench bosses have it especially tough. According to research Peter Tanner conducted for FiveThirtyEight a few years ago, the average NHL coach stayed in his post for 2.4 seasons, which was roughly the same as the average for the NBA (2.3) and much shorter than the typical coaching tenures in the NFL (3.6) and MLB (3.8).
And that was before this season's carnage on the ice.
After the Minnesota Wild unceremoniously dumped Bruce Boudreau last week, a grand total of eight NHL teams have changed coaches so far this season. That's in addition to the seven teams that made changes over the previous offseason, meaning 15 of the league's 31 teams -- or 48 percent -- have switched coaches since the end of last season.
Suffice to say, that's a tremendous amount of coaching turnover. Since hockey's Original Six era began in 1943, there had never been a season with more than 14 new coaches from one season to the next before 2019-20 -- so we've already seen history made this year with interim coach Dean Evason replacing Boudreau in Minnesota. And this year's eight in-season coaching changes are in a four-way tie for the second-most since 1943, trailing only...