Quote:
Originally Posted by FlamesAddiction
Agreed.
I doubt Hartley would still be the coach today if Treliving never let him go when he did. Coaches like him are about short-term results. I totally agree that his methods aren't the best for developing and nurturing young players, but I don't think it's fair to put the lack of overall success on him either. Were there better options... totally. Was anyone a better option... evidently not. Not only has the performance been largely disappointing since then, but some of the core players seem to have stagnated as well. Treliving either didn't have a plan, had a weak plan, or had a good plan and failed hard to execute it. Either way, he made a mistake. He reportedly interviewed 10 candidates and slowly watched them all sign with other teams until Gulutzan was the last man standing. If you fire a coach, you need to get an upgrade. He seemed to do it and then hoped things would work out. He traded the boat, even if it was a 14' aluminum with leaky rivets, for a mystery box that ended up containing a turd with leaking rivets.
The amount of hate Hartley gets is disproportionate to how he actually did in my opinion. He had a very young team in general, and for part of his tenure, an old star past his prime. He overachieved in one year, and got results that were expected in the other years. I don't think he ever achieved less than what the sum of the parts were. It was disappointing to regress after the year he overachieved, but it was a regression to normal. Maybe not the guy you want looking after your team while prospects are making the jump to the NHL due to the lack of fundamentals, but not worth the hate either. He had to balls to scratch Monahan and Gaudreau for not following team rules, but I guess they got the last laugh.
The main thing I liked about his time with the Flames was that the team had no quit when he was coaching. I don't know if that was a function of him being a good motivator, or the individual players being young and hungry, but now they have 'quit' coming out the wazoo. Whatever it was, they lost it after Hartley was let go. Maybe the two aren't correlated. The fact that they recaptured it in year one of Peters, suggests to me that at least part of it was coaching.
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I actually have little opinion on Hartley’s strategies. It’s more the pedestal some put him on based on a short time frame, and also because he was a major league two-faced jerk.
But they didn’t just regress in his last year - they fell by 20 points and that can’t just be Hiller, who wasn’t even the majority starter. Ramo had a passable save% and they still lost more than they won in front of him. And the team had plenty of quit that last year, while he was still coaching them. A few key guys really fell backwards in their play (Hudler, Wideman, for example).