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Originally Posted by GranteedEV
a whole lot of cyclical back-and-forth. It'd be draining to really get involved.
I think Bob Hartley is a good coach.
I also think Bob Hartley employed ineffective systems. This issue was most magnified against opponents like Hitchock's St. Louis Blues who had a tight neutral zone game that shut down his stretch pass breakout. We saw immediate improvement against the Blues the next year under Gulutzan simply by employing textbook breakouts instead of stretch passes.
I think many veterans disliked Bob Hartley, but that's okay. It's preferable to veteran favouritism that has plagued certain other coaches.
I also think young players have benefited from his coaching. Whether that was Tanguay in Colorado, Hossa and Kovalchuk in Atlanta, Monahan, Gaudreau, Backlund, Brodie, even Sam Bennett here in Calgary.
I also think veteran star players have benefited from his coaching. GioforPM mentioned Sakic won the Hart in 2001 under Hartley. Yeah. He doesn't have any other Hart trophies. You could say Sakic carried Hartley, but the flip side of that is true as well - Hartley got the literal most out of Sakic. Who was Mark Giordano before Bob Hartley? Just a solid, unspectacular #4-ish defenseman. Suddenly, and this goes back to the 2013-14 season, Hartley works with Gio on details of his game and Gio is suddenly a late bloomer Norris Candidate for the next five years. Does that happen under Brent Sutter? I doubt that. Marc Savard... we had him before Hartley got his hands on him. Lazy, out-of-shape, attitude issues, one way player. Bob Hartley turned him into the star #1 two way center that we regret losing. You really gonna call Greg Gilbert a better coach than Bob Hartley? PLEASE.
No coach is perfect. Darryl Sutter isn't perfect either, this is a guy who was literally locked out of the Kings Locker Room towards the end of his tenure there. A guy Drew Doughty threw shade at the next year for not playing an offensively free system.
Bob Hartley was a good, and also flawed coach. On a whole, I would say he was more capable than Gulutzan, Peters, or Ward. Maybe Gulutzan could have developed into a better coach with a few more years of patience, but the Gulutzan who coached here did not have the fine details of coaching down the way great coaches do.
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I think you are ascribing some things to Hartley that have no evidence behind them, like his work with Sakic, Gio and Savard. I’ve never heard any of those players credit Hartley for their rise. And Sakic, while he never won the Hart before, had 120 points way before Hartley got there. The only difference between his Hart year and any previous one starting from that 120 point season was that he never only got 65 games a year in on average. Gio had 43 points under B. Sutter, and 27 in 61 games the year before Hartley.
I’m not saying Hartley was worse than Gilbert. I’m saying he managed a worse winning percentage than all but one other coach of the Flames ever, and he did so with a team that had some decent players. Some of that was the short season and some was Kipper’s big decline, and reliance on backups. And of course, winning percentage isn’t everything - Terry Crisp was a bad coach and he won a freakin’ cup. But IMO Hartley is, at the end of the day, a mediocre coach who can do well under very specific circumstances and who no team chooses to keep even after some success.