Some more perspective on the Savard execution

After talking about Garfien's White Sox column earlier this year, I don't want people here to think I'm some sort of shill for the the Comcast Chicago website, but Josh Mora's Blackhawks blog "Hawk Talk" is looking to be on par with Chuck's Sox stuff as a weekly must read. It's probably a combination of their access and perspective, but both columns are rather informative. Mora weighed in on the firing of Savard last Thursday:

In Chicago, Denis Savard has defined hockey for the better part of three decades. He has been a Blackhawk, with only brief interruption, for almost 30 years, as a Hall-of-Fame player, as an assistant coach, and as a head coach. In a city which has only recently recognized hockey again, Savard has remained a Chicago icon -- not as a hockey player, but as a major celebrity on a par with Michael Jordan, Walter Payton, and Ryne Sandberg. In this recent run as head coach, his enthusiasm was a big selling point for his players and for the fans of his team. Denis Savard is as classy, as genuine, and as much of a gentleman as any person you will ever find in sports.

No one outside Chicago disagrees with that assessment, perhaps with the exception of the few holdout old-school Minnesota North Star fans. The questions outside Chicago were simply about his ability to coach. In talking with several national hockey sources on Thursday, they echoed the things I'd been hearing on the ground in Chicago for several weeks. That while people admire his passion and nature, and that while they admire Savard's ability to take the Blackhawks from some point off the map and get them to point A, they doubted if he had the ability to create systems and convey hockey knowledge to then get the team to Point B. I talked to a few of Savard's former players. Each one said they loved him as a person, but thought that he could be inconsistent as a coach -- that his mood at practices could change from day to day, and that he too often switched up line combinations and discarded matchups early in games.

In short, there were people both inside and outside the Blackhawks who felt that going back to last year the Hawks were getting consistently outcoached, even as they began to win games. I think of an incident in Savard's first season, when they started out 9-3-2 under Savard, but Blue Jackets' head coach Ken Hitchcock warned that the Blackhawks were "playing a very dangerous game". The Hawks then compared Savard and his experience to the other head coaches in the NHL's Central Division. All of them have at least 8 years of experience as an NHL head coach, and half of whom have won the Stanley Cup. In a year when the Hawks more or less promised their fans they would make the post-season -- a condition which Team President John McDonough famously compared to the clock being at "five minutes to midnight" when he ran the Chicago Cubs -- they felt this was a disadvantage they could no longer abide.

For sure worth reading if you've got any interest in the situation. Meanwhle, the Blackhawks notched their second win of the year -- as well as head coach Joel Quennevill's first with the team -- last night against Vancouver, making it a solid 2-0 for Chicago sports teams.