Change It Up?

The Florida Panthers have fired Head Coach Gerard Gallant. This news does come as a little bit of a surprise to the hockey world. Gallant had just led the Panthers to the best season in the team's 23 years. The Panthers won the Atlantic Division in 2015-16 with a team record 47 wins and 103 points. Florida was the surprise team of the year, a lot of that success was due to Gallant. However, Florida has not been as magical this season with a disappointing 11-10-1 record. Expectations were high for the young talented team. So a .500 record was not good enough for Gallant to keep his job.

The Panthers join a growing list of teams in recent years that have made a head coaching change mid-season. The old days of giving a head coach a season to sort things out with a team and improve are gone. There was a time when firing a head coach during the season was unthinkable. General thought from owners and upper management was they would allow the team to struggle through the season and make the change in the offseason. This would give them more time to find the right new coach and allow him to groom the team. Today ownership cannot afford to let a season slip away.

The Panthers are hoping to spark the same magic as the recent mid-season shakeups everyone remembers. The 2008-09 Pittsburgh Penguins were coming off a season where they were runner-ups in the Stanley Cup Finals, but looked like they were going to miss the playoffs. That was until they fired Michel Therrien and promoted Dan Bylsma from the AHL. Bylsma helped turn the Penguins around to not only make the playoffs, but win the Stanley Cup that season. In 2011-12 the LA Kings had a young and talented, yet undisciplined team. That changed when the team made Darryl Sutter their head coach 31 games into the season. Sutter completely changed the way the Kings played and helped them win the first Stanley Cup in team history. Most recently the Pittsburgh Penguins caught lightning in a bottle for a second time just last season. They fired Mike Johnston in December of that season and replaced him with Mike Sullivan. Coach Sullivan helped the Penguins realize their full potential and win another Stanley Cup.

The Florida Panthers are taking an obvious gamble. Not every team that has fired their coach during the season has improved. The 2011-12 Montreal Canadiens were 13-12-7 through 32 games and decided to relieve Jacques Martin of his coaching duties, in favor of Randy Cunneyworth . The Canadiens would go onto finish last in the Eastern Conference. The 2014-15 Toronto Maple Leafs were sitting in a playoff spot in January when the team fired Randy Carlyle and replaced him with Peter Horachek. The Maple Leafs fell apart and missed the playoffs that season.

The moral of the story is we just do not know what the right call is. I guess it comes down to how much you believe in the players. It was obvious in the case of the Kings and both Penguins scenarios that the teams were great, but simply did not know how to be successful. The Canadiens and especially the Maple Leafs were average teams being propped up by good coaching at the beginning of their season's.

The Florida Panthers are a good young team, with very strong veterans. However, I find it hard to believe that any coach can make them a Stanley Cup champion. This team is talented, but not mature enough to beat teams like the Penguins, Lightning or Canadiens in a seven game series. It would take a great coach to take this team deep into the playoffs. I do not believe this was the right call for the Panthers organization. Gallant may not have been the coach that would bring the Panthers their first Stanley Cup, but he coached that team to achieve more than what anyone believed they were capable of. 22 games is simply not enough time to prove the Panthers were going in the wrong direction, especially after 103 points last season.