Stars Hire Retread Crawford as Coach

The success of coaches in professional sports is difficult to predict. Bill Belichick was an abject failure in Cleveland, but is now considered one of the top coaches in all of sports. Flip Saunders did pretty well for himself in Minnesota, but could not bring a championship to Detroit. In the NHL, Claude Julien and Paul Maurice are two examples of coaches who got the proverbial walking papers and found great success at later jobs.

Since coaches are essentially hired to be fired, veteran NHL coach Marc Crawford has been fired. He's actually about to begin his fourth stop in the league, as the Dallas Stars hired him Thursday to replace the fired Dave Tippett.

Crawford won a Stanley Cup in Colorado, but that was 13 summers ago. As Tim Cowlishaw notes in the Dallas Morning News, Crawford has made the second round of the Stanley Cup Playoffs exactly once in his last eight years of coaching. If the idea is to go get a proven playoff performer to lead the Stars back to the promised land, Crawford is quite the odd choice, especially given that Tippett himself led this team to the Western Conference Finals just one year ago.

There's something else strange about this hire. The Stars have said they are not going to spend to the salary cap next season. That means veteran free agents Jere Lehtinen and Sergei Zubov, among others, may not be asked to come back. If they do return, their roles and pricetags should be signifcantly reduced from past years. 34-year-old goalie Marty Turco, after an uneven season, could be a trade-rumor magnet, since he enters the last year of his contract at $5.4 million.

Indeed, a youth movement is likely on the way. Expect to see a lot of Fabian Brunnstrom, Krys Barch, and James Neal, along with mainstay top-liners Brad Richards, Mike Ribeiro, and the returning Brenden Morrow. On defense, the Stars can build around an impressive young group of Trevor Daley, Nicklas Grossman, Mark Fistric, Matt Niskanen, and Ivan Vishnevskiy. Among this list of five blue-liners, Daley is the oldest at 25, while Vishnevskiy is the youngest at 21.

So is Crawford the best fit for this kind of team? When he got canned in Los Angeles after last season, Helene Elliott (via Mike Heika) provided a rather scathing obituary for his tenure, as she made it abundantly clear that Crawford was not right for the Kings gig.

Crawford wasn't going to get them remotely close to contending for the Stanley Cup, not with his habitual scalding criticism of the kids who are becoming the core of this team and will make up an even greater chunk of the Kings' roster and soul next season.

... The Kings had more hope than skill and Crawford couldn't function under those circumstances, couldn't be patient with kids who were learning and making mistakes and needed a teacher more than they needed a screamer who demanded more than they were capable of delivering.

... The defense was a mess and Crawford's relentless rebukes of (Jack) Johnson, among others, only made things worse.

In turn, general manager Dean Lombardi, who has overseen the mother of all NHL youth movements, hired veteran coach Terry Murray, himself a retread, to take over the team. This season, the Kings missed the playoffs, but were a thorn in the sides of many playoffs teams, as the young team improved throughout the season and positioned itself as an emerging threat in the Western Conference.

While Crawford has accomplished a lot in the NHL and is just 48 years old, it's hard not to look at this move as change for the sake of change. Tippett did a good job in Dallas, and he'll coach again.

Crawford could make new general manager Joe Nieuwendyk look like a genius by leading a younger Stars team to the playoffs. Of course, fans could get a very bad first impression of the new boss if Crawford fails.