The ‘New Coach Bump’ is real…and it’s temporary

Credit: © Steven Bisig-USA TODAY Sports

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Ken Hitchcock estimated the drive would be five hours, give or take. He was determined to make every minute of it count.

It was November 2011. The struggling St. Louis Blues had just fired head coach Davis Payne and named Hitchcock their new bench boss. They had a home game scheduled for two days later, and there was no time to waste. Hitchcock fired up the handsfree in his car and spent the entire drive talking to Blues players, discussing what they needed to do to turn their season around. ‘Hitch,’ who had coached the Dallas Stars to their first Stanley Cup title in 1999 and the Columbus Blue Jackets to their first playoff birth in 2009, knew enough not to overload his new charges, almost none of whom he had met in his previous coaching stops. He focused on a single subject: checking. He kept his instruction simple.

The Blues went out and won their first game under Hitchcock, shutting out the Chicago Blackhawks. The Blues won a bunch of games that season, going 43-15-11, rising all the way to a Central Division title and earning Hitchcock the Jack Adams Award.

It was the quintessential example of how to execute a mid-season turnaround correctly, and it’s actually something we see often in the NHL. The Vancouver Canucks won their first seven games last season after Bruce Boudreau took over from Travis Green. The Edmonton Oilers clicked after Jay Woodcroft replaced Dave Tippett and they crusaded all the way to the 2022 Western Conference Final. The Montreal Canadiens were ready to run through brick walls for Martin St. Louis by the end of last winter.

Now, Rick Tocchet will attempt to engineer similar magic with the Vancouver Canucks. In his debut game behind their bench this week, replacing Boudreau, they looked transformed, tilting the ice in a win over Chicago. In Game 2? They were so bad against the Seattle Kraken that they left Tocchet stammering, “I don’t know what to say,” in his post-game media availability. The road to a mid-season turnaround isn’t automatically easy.

But let’s slow down for a moment and ask: is the mid-season turnaround actually ‘A Thing?’ Or is it a myth, something only the all-time greats in the vein of Hitchcock can execute?

Only one way to find out, right? I decided to crunch the numbers on the last 20 mid-season coaching changes in the NHL. I broke coaches’ new arrivals into three pockets: the first 20 games, second 20 games and third 20 games, to see if a pattern would emerge. The results were illuminating. For the sake of the exercise, I omitted Andrew Brunette (Florida), Dave Lowry (Winnipeg), Geoff Ward (Calgary) and Rick Bowness (Dallas), as they came in as mid-season replacements for non-hockey reasons and, in a few of those cases, inherited competitive teams. In their situations, they weren’t necessarily being asked to fix broken clubs, so it would feel inaccurate to include their hirings for this study.

Onto the results:

Mid-season coaching hires

Coach	Team	Hired	Record before	1^st 20	2^nd 20	3^rd 20
J. Woodcroft	EDM	2022	23-18-3	12-6-2	15-4-1	11-9-0
M. St. Louis*	MTL	2022	8-30-7	10-7-3	6-14-0	10-9-1
B. Boudreau*	VAN	2021	8-15-2	12-4-4	11-7-2	9-7-4
M. Yeo	PHI	2022	8-10-4	5-11-4	7-10-3	5-14-0
D. King	CHI	2021	1-9-2	10-8-2	7-9-4	6-11-3
D. Granato	BUF	2021	6-18-4	7-10-3	7-11-2	5-12-3
D. Ducharme	MTL	2021	9-5-4	8-7-5	7-11-2	5-13-2
D. Sutter*	CGY	2021	11-12-3	8-11-1	13-6-1	10-7-3
D. Evason	MIN	2020	27-23-7	13-7-0	13-6-1	13-5-2
P. DeBoer*	VGK	2020	24-19-6	13-5-2	15-4-1	12-7-1
J. Hynes*	NSH	2020	19-15-7	11-8-1	10-10-0	9-10-1
A. Nasreddine	NJ	2019	9-13-4	8-9-3	9-6-5	2-1-0
B. Boughner	SJ	2019	15-16-2	7-11-2	8-11-1	8-9-3
S. Keefe	TOR	2019	9-10-4	15-4-1	8-9-3	14-5-1
M. Crawford	OTT	2019	22-37-5	7-10-1	– – –	– – –
B. Murray	ANA	2019	21-26-9	10-10-0	4-2-0	– – –
S. Gordon	PHI	2018	12-15-4	10-8-2	12-6-2	3-8-0
J. Colliton	CHI	2018	6-6-3	4-13-3	12-5-3	11-8-1
K. Hitchcock*	EDM	2018	9-10-1	10-8-2	6-11-3	9-8-3
W. Desjardins*	LA	2018	4-8-1	7-12-1	11-7-2	4-12-4

*External hire		Record	251-315-82	187-169-42	181-149-34	146-155-33
		Pts %	.451	.523	.544	.487

So the bump is in fact real. In those first 20 games, coaches held a .523 points percentage. Keep in mind that they were replacing bad teams. The combined points percentage of those franchises was .451 at the time of the hirings – more specifically, only five of 20 had winning records – so a .523 mark is even more impressive than it appears. Twelve of the 20 coaches, or 60 percent, got their teams playing .500 hockey or better in the first 20 games. That means seven coaches took teams with losing or .500 records and made them winning teams in the first 20 games.
The bigger bump came in the second set of 20, when the midseason hires elevated their teams to a .544 clip, likely the result of getting to know their players better and successfully installing new systems. Nine of the 20 even milked double-digit win totals out of this period.
Note the big plummet to .487 hockey in the third block of 20. Did the euphoria wear off? By games 41-60, we were sometimes on to the next season, so did the room’s buy-in evaporate? Did offseason roster changes upset the chemistry?
Inheriting a decent group certainly helps. All five coaches taking over teams that already had winning records were able to maintain winning records in their first 20 games.
Just seven of the 20 midseason replacements were external hires – as in, they had no previous ties to the organization as assistant coaches or AHL coaches and thus didn’t have any continuity with the players. They held a slightly higher success rate at .527 in those first 20 games, but the difference was negligible.

So why does the midseason bump consistently work in those first 40 games? And why does it frequently fall off a cliff afterward?

Who better to ask than Hitchcock, one of the most experienced and frequent mid-season hires in NHL history?

Back to that five-hour drive in fall 2011. For him, the key to getting early results was to not overcomplicate and bombard his new troops with every tenet of a new plan. Maybe that works during an offseason in which you can go out for a steak dinner with every core player. But with two days between a coaching change and the first game? Keep it simple.

“When you look at changes that are good, where the team really has a jump, it’s because the coach comes in there and embraces something that can keep them competitive, like checking,” Hitchcock told Daily Faceoff. “It takes one subject. You really focus on that subject and don’t talk about winning hockey games or anything. And in St. Louis it was all about checking. They embraced it on the drive there. They were wanting to be a better checking team. And they took off.”

They won eight of their first 11 games after he took over. Playing that stripped-down game, focusing on one goal, brought structure. The Blues became the NHL’s tightest-checking team, allowing a league-low 26.7 shots per game that season. When Hitchcock joined the Edmonton Oilers as a mid-season replacement for Todd McLellan in 2018-19, he did the same thing, locking onto one subject to the point that, even in pre-game skates, he was only pushing ‘checking’ as the area of focus. The Oilers, just like the Blues, won eight of their first 11 games post-change.

Yet the numbers tell us that the bump can often be temporary. We all know what happened with Boudreau this season, and even St. Louis has experienced a reality check trying to will a bad Habs team to success in 2022-23. The adrenaline of hearing a new voice or buying into a single concept like checking can only last so long. Eventually, a sustainable long-term structure must be in place. According to Hitchcock, whether you achieve that as a new coach largely depends on how effectively you win over your team’s loudest voices.

“In the middle of trying to get it to change, you have to get an unbelievable buy-in from your leaders,” he said. “They have to embrace everything you’re doing. And that’s what happened in (Dallas, St. Louis and Edmonton). I really partnered up with the leaders. There was added responsibility towards them. There was probably more communication than they wanted at times (laughs)…You’re not going to get a complete buy-in from your team, it’s going to take time, but if you get buy-in from your leaders, and they push the message in the room, you’re going to be able to sustain in it for a longer period of time.”

Back to the Vancouver Canucks circus of the past two seasons as a case study. They got the immediate buy-in under Boudreau last season, but could their leadership be trusted in the long term? Star forward J.T. Miller is known for a volatile personality at the best of times, and whispers out of Vancouver have suggested his presence often divides the room. Meanwhile, captain Bo Horvat entered this season without a new contract and openly lamented to the media during the team’s early slump that he worried they would never win another game. When veteran voices like those are so disconnected, it’s no wonder Boudreau couldn’t sustain what the team built last season. That’s not to assume those players didn’t click with Boudreau, who said Miller sent him “the most beautiful text” after the firing, but not every leader is equipped to transport a message from coach to teammate.

The good news is: if you’re a struggling team looking for a quick surge, go ahead and make a midseason coaching change. The data suggests it will almost certainly work for a while. But wallpapering over some deeper personnel problems will only last so long. You have to ice the right roster of players. with the right leadership makeup, if you want the new coach to achieve long-term success.

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The ‘New Coach Bump’ is real…and it’s temporary

Mid-season coaching hires

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