1979 Cincinnati WHA...is this kinda odd?

[stardog]

I don't know about the impact the actual team had but I thought that this was a little bit unusual.
4 players from this team went on to become the head coach of an NHL team post playing career. Several others became NHL assistant coaches (besides those 4) which I guess several former players do but becoming a head coach has FAR lesser odds.
To have 4 guys on one non NHL team to do so seems pretty remarkable IMO.
I attribute this to the aura of leadership provided by yet another young player on this team who very well could one day bring that number to 5 (and according to reports a few years back he was close to doing so) in one Mark Messier.
One of the 4 players (Bryan Watson) only got 18 games as a head coach but he actually coached former teammate Messier (and Gretzky Kurri Anderson Lowe etc) and only won 4 of those 18 games before giving way to Glen Sather.
The other 3 in no particular order are Robby Ftorek, Rick Dudley and Barry "Makes the Mullet fashionable" Melrose.

Cincinnati Stingers 1978-79 roster and scoring statistics at hockeydb.com

One other player of note in his post playing career would be longtime NHL head referee Paul Stewart who reffed over a thousand games and who is the only American who played and refereed in the NHL.

Might be more common but I fell down a rabbit hole when wanting to check out Mike Gartner's (who was also on this team) career stats....which I have a question about in a following post.

Click to read more...

 

[The Panther]

Yeah, I've noticed also that that squad a had a really notable line-up of future stars and future head coaches, including Wayne Gretzky's future best friend and two of his future NHL coaches. (Also, his 1981 Hart / Pearson competition -- Mike Liut.)

Steve Shutt's younger brother Byron was on this team, too. So Messier played with Steve Shutt's younger brother and then Ken Dryden's younger brother the next year in the NHL (briefly).

 

[stardog]

That's cool also. Didn't even look at the playing careers of the players as I saw Melrose Dudley and Ftorek's names and they jumped out. I honestly didn't even know of Watson being a coach until I looked!

 

[The Panther]

That's cool also. Didn't even look at the playing careers of the players as I saw Melrose Dudley and Ftorek's names and they jumped out. I honestly didn't even know of Watson being a coach until I looked!

Yeah, I'm not clear what the connection was between Sather and Bryan Watson. (This is detailed in Peter Gzowski's excellent The Game of our Lives from 1981.) But Sather brought Watson in to coach the Oilers in the autumn of 1980 (2nd NHL season), and the team got off to a bad start at 4-9-5 and Sather promptly fired Watson.

Sather scored when he found John Muckler, who would be the Oilers' co-coach and kind of ran the systems and such while Sather concentrated on other things (like paying Grant Fuhr's bills).

 

[Dennis Bonvie]

I don't know about the impact the actual team had but I thought that this was a little bit unusual.
4 players from this team went on to become the head coach of an NHL team post playing career. Several others became NHL assistant coaches (besides those 4) which I guess several former players do but becoming a head coach has FAR lesser odds.
To have 4 guys on one non NHL team to do so seems pretty remarkable IMO.
I attribute this to the aura of leadership provided by yet another young player on this team who very well could one day bring that number to 5 (and according to reports a few years back he was close to doing so) in one Mark Messier.
One of the 4 players (Bryan Watson) only got 18 games as a head coach but he actually coached former teammate Messier (and Gretzky Kurri Anderson Lowe etc) and only won 4 of those 18 games before giving way to Glen Sather.
The other 3 in no particular order are Robby Ftorek, Rick Dudley and Barry "Makes the Mullet fashionable" Melrose.
Cincinnati Stingers 1978-79 roster and scoring statistics at hockeydb.com

One other player of note in his post playing career would be longtime NHL head referee Paul Stewart who reffed over a thousand games and who is the only American who played and refereed in the NHL.

Might be more common but I fell down a rabbit hole when wanting to check out Mike Gartner's (who was also on this team) career stats....which I have a question about in a following post.

So you think the aura of leadership provided by an 18 year-old who scored one goal in 47 games accounts for the number of coaches that came from this team?

Bit of a stretch, I'd say.

 

[stardog]

So you think the aura of leadership provided by an 18 year-old who scored one goal in 47 games accounts for the number of coaches that came from this team?

Bit of a stretch, I'd say.

Yeah ....that was sarcasm. I didn't think I needed to explain that given both context and how ridiculous a notion it is that an 18 year old kid being on a team means that several members of the team would become NHL coaches one day simply because of his aura...

 

[Theokritos]

I don't know about the impact the actual team had but I thought that this was a little bit unusual.
4 players from this team went on to become the head coach of an NHL team post playing career. Several others became NHL assistant coaches (besides those 4) which I guess several former players do but becoming a head coach has FAR lesser odds.

On top of it, Bill Gilligan became a very successful head coach in the European minor leagues in the 1980s and early 1990s. He won seven domestic championships (Austria, Switzerland) in eight years during that time.

 

[Dennis Bonvie]

Yeah ....that was sarcasm. I didn't think I needed to explain that given both context and how ridiculous a notion it is that an 18 year old kid being on a team means that several members of the team would become NHL coaches one day simply because of his aura...

OK