[Itse]

I think it's important not to conflate abusive behavior with good coaching.

Mike Babcock is a smart, meticulous and hard working coach who was an early adopter of modern puck possession hockey in the NHL (the origins of which I'd place in Sweden if a single point of origin can be named). Detroit wasn't considered a model franchise because of their coaching as such, they were a model franchise in drafting, patient player development and in sticking to a system of play season after season. The Babcock/Holland was never considered a dynasty though. They were consistently good, but in no way untouchable. Maybe the model franchise Red Wings would have more championships if Babcock didn't abuse his players? Who knows.

Darryl Sutters teams are often praised as hard working, but let's remember he's nothing special as a regular season coach. His claim to fame is playoff hockey, and I would personally argue that his biggest strength as a coach is his ability to neutralize another teams offense and in general finding ways to disrupt what ever the other teams tries to do. You can't do that just by hard work, you also have to have extremely good (and rather specific) tactical skills.

This discussion is also hardly anything new. Even back in 1994 there was plenty of talk that the Rangers won their championship in spite of Keenan, not because of him, and at best he managed to unify the team against him.

In general "these coaches were abusive and still won championships" is not much of an argument, especially if you add "most coaches behaved like that back in the day".

This is sports. No matter how the coaches behave, someone gets crowned champions every season. The existence of abusive successful coaches proves nothing, unless you can show that abusive coaches have a better track record than others. How many abusive coaches have failed miserably over the years? Likely a lot more than their have been successful ones. We just don't talk about the hasbeens no one remembers.

Plus let's remember that abuse requires power. Good coaches have a lot of say inside the organization, enabling them to be abusive. Bad coaches trying to pull the same antics have likely been run out of town rather quickly.

Edit: in addition to that, manipulative people tend to pick weak targets. I think it's very telling that the incidents we're hearing about have mostly been about marginal players or even injured ones.

If these antics were primarily about motivation, you'd think the primary targets would be the stars, as their performance is most important for team success. If however we assume that abusive behavior is mostly about the joy of bullying, then the targets should logically be players in vulnerable situations, as they make the for easy targets. The latter seems to be the case, not the former.

Tl:dr; success enables abuse, not the other way around.