Dallas Eakins..what went wrong?

[ForeverJerseyGirl]

Excellent post. Could be the basis for a book.

Thank you

 

[workedforme]

Honestly it would be easier to list the things that went right.
-provided us with many awesome gifs
-media is slightly more healthy since he turfed the doughnuts and replaced with fruit trays
-.....

 

[MarkGio]

Honestly it would be easier to list the things that went right.
-provided us with many awesome gifs
-media is slightly more healthy since he turfed the doughnuts and replaced with fruit trays
-.....

Plus it exposed MacT and KLowe a little more.

 

[Sorge Georos]

Winning changes everything. Had the Oilers been successful, his emphasis on fitness would be praised endlessly (see Chip Kelly, Philidelphia Eagles coach).

 

[McJeety McJeet]

It was a terrible coach to team match up for sure. So much so that I doubt he'll even get another chance in the big leagues.

That's too bad. I'd love to see what he would be able to do in Vancouver, Calgary, or Toronto over a couple years.

 

[workedforme]

Plus it exposed MacT and KLowe a little more.

True. MacT did say Eakins was the decision he'd be judged on. Of course there's no way MacT could have known then how slow ownership is to hand down judgement/how many times you can drop the ball before you get fired by the ragtag organization.

 

[MarkGio]

True. MacT did say Eakins was the decision he'd be judged on. Of course there's no way MacT could have known then how slow ownership is to hand down judgement/how many times you can drop the ball before you get fired by the ragtag organization.

I predict MacT will hire a legit NHL coach who will perform worse than Nelson, which ultimately results in the firing of MacT and KLowe.


Oilers fans take to the streets as if they won Lord Stanley

 

[Barney Gumble]

Dallas Eakins..what went wrong?

He was dealt a very bad hand; but played the hand he was dealt very badly.

Don't blame the fool but the fool that hires the fool.

 

[loudi94]

I believe he made his name mostly during the lockout year with the Marlies. He had the benefit of a group of established veterans on that team and he rode them as far as he could in order to win. I don't think he gave his rookies much of a shot and it probably set the organization back a little as a result.

 

[Tonka]

I can't comment on Eakins as I don't watch Oilers game that often, but from a management standpoint, like the Leafs, it takes forever for both teams to solve their main issues.

Edmonton's problems lie in goaltending and defense, what do they do at the draft? Get Draisaitl. Now if they get first overall, they can't be dumb and not take McDavid. So the process will just keep going, where they have forwards but terrible defense and goaltending.

The Leafs? They needed skilled forwards desperately, they took guys like Schenn and Gauthier. At least thankfully now they are drafting smarter with picks like Kadri, Rielly and Nylander.

Drafting is just a small example about how terrible management can be for both teams.

 

[s7ark]

Eakins has a massive ego and suffers from smartest man in the room syndrome. Something that MacT and Lowe share so it makes sense why they love Dallas.

Dallas came in and tried to reinvent the wheel. His swarm style of play worked in the AHL because players there were slower and not as talented so if you just kept pressuring the guy with the puck, eventually they would make a mistake and turn it over. In the NHL, guys just flip it to the open man, causing insanely good scoring chances against. And Eakins absolutely refused to see this. He thought the problem was that the kids just didn't understand how to play his system, so practices consisted of lots of talking and leisurely skating. And then in games we'd bleed prime scoring chances because the team commonly had 3 and 4 players chasing one guy.

The bottom line is that he's a horrible, one-trick coach. He is incapable of trying anything other than what worked for his Marlies. Also, he tries to add as many of his old players as possible, because they worked out for him in the AHL. Any team that hires him will regret it if their hope is to win, and not to draft in the top 5.

 

[MessierII]

He's the definition of a talker. He loves the mic, loves the sound of his own voice but there is absolutely no substance behind it.

 

[BLONG7]

he was never good.

The TO media hype was at fault here...agreed, he wasn't near as good as some thought...

 

[JoeLH]

With Ralph Krueger pressing so much more out of a weak and unbalanced Oilers roster in his time in Edmonton, i'm pretty surprised that Eakins still has a decent amount of supporters.

 

[Mc5RingsAndABeer]

Inability to adapt. He was deadset on improving his Corsi without actually making his goal to improve the team. Our Corsi improved, but the assumptions that make Corsi correlate to wins started to break down (quality of shots being the same in the long run). The Oilers were giving up premium chances and getting low-quality chances themselves. Eakins was too blinded by Corsi to realize this.

 

[RandV]

Every coach has to start somewhere, and if a coach can ever be considered as sort of prospect, Eakins was a highly ranked prospect that was a bust.

You just can't know how good a coach really is until you try them in the NHL

I don't know about this. I guess you could say he was highly ranked since he won in the AHL, but being with Toronto it surely got overblown in the media. For his NHL career he was interviewed by Vancouver first, Gillis I believe said he wasn't ready, then he chatted up the idiots in Edmonton who already had a coach and they hired him on the spot... or something like that. Point is there was a lot of hype from fans and Toronto media but he wasn't really well vetted by NHL management teams. Did anyone other than Vancouver give him an interview before Edmonton hired him?

Also it's a relatively minor thing amidst everything else he did, but perhaps the first public warning bell was the Zack Kassian incident in preseason. Understandably Edmonton fans were pissed at Kassian's dumb move that injured Sam Gagner, but Eakins quote: "It was a disturbing play by a disturbing player". Who actually says things like that?

 

[Hynh]

I can't comment on Eakins as I don't watch Oilers game that often, but from a management standpoint, like the Leafs, it takes forever for both teams to solve their main issues.

Edmonton's problems lie in goaltending and defense, what do they do at the draft? Get Draisaitl. Now if they get first overall, they can't be dumb and not take McDavid. So the process will just keep going, where they have forwards but terrible defense and goaltending.

The Leafs? They needed skilled forwards desperately, they took guys like Schenn and Gauthier. At least thankfully now they are drafting smarter with picks like Kadri, Rielly and Nylander.

Drafting is just a small example about how terrible management can be for both teams.

You can't say that Draisaitl was bad drafting because he wasn't a defenceman. Fleury was the top ranked defenceman after Ekblad and he went 7th. Fleury isn't lighting the world on fire either. And the year before they took Nurse over Nichushkin.

You can argue bad asset management, poor drafting in the later rounds or that they should have taken Bennett but to say they screwed up by not taking Fleury is just plain wrong. I want MacTavish fired but the only way to do that is to repeat the facts.

 

[Mike Jones]

He never recovered from losing Rose.

He seems to be doing fine with Broadchurch...

 

[MessierII]

Fun fact Eakins had a losing record in the AHL

 

[Boomhower]

Dallas Eakins is all about Dallas Eakins.

Guy's head can barely fit through a door.
For what reason? I have no idea, but he loves himself greatly, despite his mediocre playing career and terrible showing as a coach.

Apparently his marathon running should make him relevant in the hockey business?

 

[Seedling]

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.

I think I'm going to frame this.

 

[ForeverJerseyGirl]

I think I'm going to frame this.

Feel free. It felt good to get all that off my chest, because I don't remember ever being as irked by an NHL coach as I was by Eakins, and he wasn't even coaching my team, so I can't imagine how it must have felt being an Oiler fan having to deal with his insufferable presence all the time...

 

[Fire Sweeney]

He can't coach. Being friends with the Toronto media doesn't change that.

 

[Rawg]

Feel free. It felt good to get all that off my chest, because I don't remember ever being as irked by an NHL coach as I was by Eakins, and he wasn't even coaching my team, so I can't imagine how it must have felt being an Oiler fan having to deal with his insufferable presence all the time...

I would add something about making Ferrence captain

 

[Seedling]

Feel free. It felt good to get all that off my chest, because I don't remember ever being as irked by an NHL coach as I was by Eakins, and he wasn't even coaching my team, so I can't imagine how it must have felt being an Oiler fan having to deal with his insufferable presence all the time...

What makes it worse is that the Toronto media spun this guy to look like a genius to the end that we were one of apparently 3 teams trying to hire him.