I think it’s pretty clear by now that Eakins was a monumental failure as an NHL head coach, so, in situations like that, I believe it is a combination of factors that caused him to fall flat on his face so spectacularly. Removing the factors (like a flawed roster) that Eakins couldn’t control, I’ll just discuss some I feel that he could.
His first error was probably in how he chose to make his initial communication to his players. It’s been reported that during the summer prior to his rookie NHL coaching campaign, he sent letters out to the Oiler athletes describing how he wanted them to all be in shape for training camp. That’s going to leave a negative, demanding, and potentially hostile impression with the members of the team, because his introduction to them was all about his expectations of them and nothing about what they needed from him. To those who already come to camp in prime condition, it will be condescending—like explaining to a member of the police force the importance of not committing burglary. To those who aren’t disposed to show up fit, it’s probably not going to change their training regime and is just going to incline them to internally revolt against whatever demands he places on them, planting the seeds of discontent against the coach before they’ve even met him. Basically, Eakins created a chance of conflict with players before he met them because he chose a combative manner of introduction, and he gave some players who he might not have needed to offend (since they would have shown up to camp fit) a reason to be miffed with him. Not the best first move, in a nutshell.
Building off the theme of Eakins’ bad first impression (which is really hard to get back), Eakins also came across as the most arrogant coach, rookie or veteran, that I’ve ever seen give an NHL interview. Before he had even coached his first NHL game, he was speaking as if he was being inducted into the Hall of Fame. I’ve read enough comments from other hockey fans to know that almost everyone shared this impression of the guy, so I bring it up because if fans react so negatively to him based on a relatively short exposure in interviews, what must it be like for the players to be around that all the time in practices, games, on the road, and in the locker room? Probably extremely grating, and that might be a charitable understatement.
Eakins also seemed very bent on establishing himself as a control freak and dictator in the minutia of the lives of media and players alike. With the media, I think from the time he arrived in Edmonton, he was insistent that their donuts be replaced with fruit and veggie platters, which isn’t going to endear him to the local reporters, and showed that he was so obsessed with fitness that he forgot to respect some traditions already in place in the organization and people’s basic rights to make choices about what they eat. He could easily have just asked for platters of fruits and veggies to be placed out along with the donuts, thus giving people a healthy choice, and presenting himself in a positive light as the giver of something extra—but instead he chose to snatch something away in a sanctimonious fashion, which portrayed him in a negative light.
Likewise, and more significantly, with his own players, he changed the decor of the locker room, removing a lot of the dynasty Oiler era momentos (thus showing more disregard for the franchise’s history) and putting up some weird slogans about cutting wood and carrying water. If he really wanted to give his players a chance to forge a new identity as a team, he would have let them have input into the decoration of the locker room, but instead he made all the decisions for himself—so it became his locker room, not theirs. He also took away their ping pong table. It’s a little thing, but it takes away some of their freedom and fun, and it’s a basically needless change designed to highlight his authority over their lives. It’s also a pretty foolish thing for a rookie coach to focus on when he should be concerned with honing systems.
Perhaps because he was such a control freak, Eakins seemed to coach through fear when he bothered to coach at all. He benched Yakupov a ton, for instance, and didn’t really appear to try other ways of getting through to the young man. Techniques like that might work in the AHL, where players have to listen and obey the coach if they don’t want to end up in the hockey wilderness forever, but in the NHL, where players have already made the big leagues, they don’t necessarily have to bend over backward to do whatever coach says. Fear isn’t always the best motivator, but it looked like it was the only one that Eakins knew how to draw upon.
I qualified the coaching through fear when he bothered to coach at all, because I noticed that behind the bench, Eakins rarely interacted physically or verbally with his players. Instead, he spent most of his time there preening for the cameras and flicking his hair back (why he didn’t get a hair cut if it was in his eyes all the time, I’ll never know), resembling a B Grade actor auditioning for a role as a coach in a Hollywood film rather than an actual NHL coach. Players who were traded from the Oilers to various other NHL teams also commented on how much faster the pace of the practices with their new teams were. This leads me to believe that Eakins ran practices that were very slow paced, perhaps loaded with him yammering on about fitness and swarm defense as he did in his press conferenes ad nauseam. No wonder players tuned him out. After five seconds of listening to most of his interviews, I did the same.
Eakins also had a lot of bizarre theories about hockey. His swarm defense was total chaos that was completely ineffective with his team but he clung to it stubbornly even when the win-loss column should have made it apparent to even a casual fan that the method wasn’t working. I also remember reading a quote of his where he compared hockey to football, suggesting with sincerity that it was crazy players like Jonathan Toews didn’t have to memorize a playbook, which indicates to me that Eakins couldn’t spot the difference between static football and free-flow hockey. That sets of major alarms about his ability to think strategy in hockey, since he plainly overshoots what it is possible for NHL players to recognize and do in real time in hockey, which is kind of bizarre since I think he played in about 100 NHL games as a player, so you would assume he would know better, but I guess he’s just not a great learner or critical thinker. He also was a lover of stats, which in itself is fine, but he didn’t have a clue how to interpret them. I recall him bragging after the Oilers were defeated by the LA Kings that his team had outshot the Kings, but he didn’t seem to comprehend that his team had outshot the Kings since the Kings had jumped to a multi-goal lead in the first period and just turtled to victory after that. Stats are only as useful as the people collecting and interpreting them, and Eakins wasn’t very good at understanding how to look at the nuances of data to arrive at even elementary conclusions. Essentially, he was bursting with new ideas—thought he was God’s gift to coaching hockey—but really these notions were so out in left field that they weren’t even in the stadium.
TL;DR: Eakins comes across as an arrogant control freak who coaches through fear and is filled to the ears with bizarre ideas about hockey that he chose to inflict upon players and media rather than doing his job behind the bench and in practice. He was more concerned with his image—flicking his hair and flipping out at Taylor Hall when water got on his suit—than he was in actually understanding NHL systems and statistics. He was more focused on how he sounded—making sure he spewed out some nice catch phrases—than he was with winning hockey games. He was a socially awkward self-promoter (who probably wasn’t even self-aware enough to know how terribly he presented himself to others) who stirred up needless conflicts and wasn’t prepared for the NHL gig that he landed. No wonder his players and the media didn’t like him.
