St. Louis Blues, Armstrong Forfeiting Next Season

What is the only thing worse than losing three consecutive first-round playoff series to the road team in consecutive years?

Allowing next season to be a complete photocopy of the last three years by deliberately passing on other opportunities before this year’s Cup has even been won.

Decisions about players will happen over the summer and that is certainly understandable, and a next-day decision regarding Blues’ Head Coach Ken Hitchcock after the Wild exit would likely have been imprudent.

But the Blues are permitting Sir Kenneth to take his sweet time and mull over his decision about whether he even wants to coach the Blues next year, while Mike Babcock, Todd McLellan, John Tortorella, Craig Berube and others are available and in various stages of preparation toward new coaching jobs.

This is especially confounding when it seems clear that by now, Doug Armstrong should have fired Hitchcock.

NHL.com is reporting that Babcock will make his decision within the next week. Meanwhile, McLellan appears all but confirmed with the Edmonton Oilers.

Tick-tock.

Blues GM Doug Armstrong has distinguished himself as a savvy field general over the past several seasons. (While the Ryan Miller experiment was a catastrophe, I had personally and passionately wanted the trade to happen myself, and still feel the deal as a bust owed almost entirely to Miller’s inexplicable failure to perform while wearing the Blue Note, and I cannot fault Army for that.)

Jan 29, 2015; St. Louis, MO, USA; Saint Louis Blues general manager Doug Armstrong (left) looks on as Martin Brodeur addresses the media during a press conference at Scottrade Center. Mandatory Credit: Scott Kane-USA TODAY Sports

The biggest question for many fans is surely why Hitchcock is still around at all. It goes without saying that the core of Blues players who failed yet again to produce at all in their quarterfinal series against the Wild—T.J. Oshie, Jaden Schwartz, David Backes, Alexander Steen, and Paul Stastny—were largely responsible for the Blues’ pathetic post-season.

At this point it is also at least as obvious that Ken Hitchcock bears more than a trivial share of the blame as well.

When coaches on NBA, NFL, MLB, and NHL teams consistently fail, either in the playoffs, or during the regular season, they are dismissed. Ken Hitchcock has about as dreary a playoff record over the past several seasons as any NHL coach could have.

He is 1-7 in playoff series since 2004, with an abysmal 12-24 cumulative record.

Many fans who do not play hockey, know Corsi and Fenwick stats backwards and forwards, and understand on a sophisticated level what coaching an NHL team really embraces, might well argue that their mailman could win more than half the games or do better than 1 win in 8 series in a decade simply by standing behind the bench and letting his players do what they do.

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Those fans would be wrong, but on a fan level team management needs to make a change so that the fan base at least understands that the team understands something is wrong, and that someone else with preferably more NHL than USPS experience needs to replace Hitchcock.

To say “Yeah, something is wrong,” but to not take immediate steps to remedy it leads to the perception that the team does not understand the things that are most obviously wrong—or worse still, that they do understand, but that fixing these things are either not that important or can wait to be fixed.

Ken Hitchcock is clearly a significant part of the St. Louis Blues’ underachieving history of self-destruction over the past several years in the postseason.

More crucially, several coaches are now available and a couple are on the cusp of finalizing their status for next season. Mike Babcock would be the best possible choice for the Blues, and the Blues might well be an ideal landing spot for Babs.

“The decision date is going to be moved up. I’ll bet you by [May] 20, I’m going to know what I’m doing.”

Unlike Hitchcock, many young Blues fans had actually been born when Babcock has most recently both been in the Stanley Cup Finals (2009) and won the Stanley Cup (2008).

He has also been singularly impressive in getting a tremendous amount of the Detroit Red Wings when they have been absolutely devastated by injuries over the past couple seasons, including long-term injuries to their superstars, Pavel Datsyuk and Henrik Zetterberg, and their starting goalie Jimmy Howard.

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The year after the Wings lost HOFer first-ballot d-man Nicklas Lidstrom to retirement as well as other key players, Detroit’s next season was all but written off as a season of adversity and “rebuilding.” Yet they not only made the playoffs but came within a heartbeat of defeating the eventual Stanley Cup champion Chicago Blackhawks in their 2013 seven-game semifinal series.

Mar 17, 2015; Calgary, Alberta, CAN; St. Louis Blues head coach Ken Hitchcock on his bench against the Calgary Flames during the second period at Scotiabank Saddledome. St. Louis Blues won 4-0. Mandatory Credit: Sergei Belski-USA TODAY Sports

In contrast, the Hitchcock-era Blues have proven insufferably fragile, plummeting in the standings when as few as one core player goes down with an injury over the past three seasons.

But the sad, mad, dull fact of the matter is that neither Babcock nor Blues fans will have an opportunity to explore that option, because as of this writing, Ken Hitchcock is the coach of the St. Louis Blues.

Why, I’ve no idea.

As reported in the NHL.com article, Babs spoke in Prague at the IIHF World Championship with Darren Dreger of TSN in an interview, saying “The decision date is going to be moved up. I’ll bet you by [May] 20, I’m going to know what I’m doing.”

He also told Dreger: “I have offers. More than one.”

This is not good for Blues fans such as myself, who see Babcock as a perfect choice to take over the Blues. But at this point the Blues and Hitchcock are sitting on their hands. By then, not only Babcock but most of the other viable head coaches will likely have new teams, leaving the Blues with…

…with what, exactly? A situation like what the Pittsburgh Penguins had this past year?

As our own Kate Cimini recently reminded me, the Pens chose to fire their GM Ray Shero back on May 16, 2014 but held off on dismissing head coach Dan Bylsma until June 6, 2014, when most of the coaching plums were off the vine.

If the Blues wait much longer, the head coaching choices left them will be of the Mike Johnston variety. Meaning: whether Hitch is the coach or not, fast-forward to the 2016-17 season. Next year is already over.

Instead, the Penguins were forced on June 25 to hire Mike Johnston, who had been the Western Hockey League Portland Winterhawks’ head coach prior to that and had never coached an NHL team before. To say that the Penguins’ 2014-15 season was one of disappointment and underachievement would be an understatement in the extreme, self-destructing the last third of the season and failing to generate any offense in the first round despite perennial weak leak Marc Andre Fleury standing on his head in goal the entire series.

The Penguins paid for their slow-footedness, bowing out in the first year while watching their coach grow into his job, and now the Blues are primed to do the exact same thing.

As a fan who has sat through the Blues’ disappointments since 1967, this one is high up on my all-time list of boneheaded moments. Regardless of the personnel choices that get made in the offseason, if Hitch is still the coach, I can fast-forward to the 2016-17 season, and so can the rest of the Blues’ fans.

Apr 26, 2015; Saint Paul, MN, USA; Minnesota Wild defenseman Jonas Brodin (25) and forward Jason Zucker (16) are among the first to congratulate goalie Devan Dubnyk (40) on the win over Saint Louis Blues in game six of the first round of the 2015 Stanley Cup Playoffs at Xcel Energy Center. The Wild defeated the Blues 4-1 advancing them to the second round of playoffs. Mandatory Credit: Marilyn Indahl-USA TODAY Sports

When Hitch (not Armstrong) finally decides how much or little he cares about the Blues (his lack of ability to lead them notwithstanding) and decides not to return, who will they hire to replace him? It likely won’t be anyone remotely resembling Mike Babcock or any of the other names currently in play, and that is a problem.

Maybe Babs isn’t the answer. His overall approach is similar to Hitch’s in some ways, and SB Nation Winging It In Motown’s JJ has an interesting analysis of Babcock’s strengths and weaknesses as a coach. But Babcock is a potent example for illustration’s sake first and foremost. If the Blues wait much longer, the head coaching choices left them will be of the Mike Johnston variety.

Meaning: whether Hitch is the coach or not, fast-forward to the 2016-17 season. Next year is already over.

What is Armstrong thinking? And why is he thinking it? And how does Blues owner Tom Stillman feel about all of this? If he’s not stomping his feet and wringing his hands, he probably should be.

Let us know your thoughts, Blues fans.

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