Dallas Eakins..what went wrong?

[missinthejets]

Meh, that's not really fair. Look at the record of the team before Eakins (under Kruger) and after Eakins (under Nelson). It's noticeably different.

It's not like we're lighting the world on fire now, but it's much better than under Eakins. He is a horrific coach, plus he lost the room.

And it's not just the record, Eberle is back to being an exciting nearly PPG player who can generate offense. Under Eakins people were ready to sell him off to the highest bidder. Yakupov looks like he actually knows how to play hockey again, under Eakins he was a bust. Jeff Petry is playing some of the best hockey he ever has since Eakins was fired. Justin Schultz looks like an offensive defenseman with some issues in his own end as opposed to a train wreck in his own end who can't even bring any offense. It's just staggering how bad some players looked under Eakins and how much better than are without him.

 

[WaltWhitman]

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.

Is there a TL;DR for your TL;DR?

Hehe jk. It was a good read.

 

[bombers15]

And it's not just the record, Eberle is back to being an exciting nearly PPG player who can generate offense. Under Eakins people were ready to sell him off to the highest bidder. Yakupov looks like he actually knows how to play hockey again, under Eakins he was a bust. Jeff Petry is playing some of the best hockey he ever has since Eakins was fired. Justin Schultz looks like an offensive defenseman with some issues in his own end as opposed to a train wreck in his own end who can't even bring any offense. It's just staggering how bad some players looked under Eakins and how much better than are without him.

Agreed on all points. Yakupov especially is looking great post-Eakins.

 

[Strat]

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.

If more people posted more constructive and well thought-of comments instead of lame jokes and snarky comments, I'd enjoy this place a lot more than I do.

Well done. Refreshing, to say the least. Let me know if you ever get a blog. I'd read for sure.

 

[KCC]

I liked his intentions and focus on defense and what he was trying to do to change the bad habits. But overall, his system was terrible. That swarm stuff wasn't NHL caliber and it was a big reason why -- It had no structure.

On the plus side, the players did learn about defense, something they never even tried to do prior to him being signed. So I give him credit for that. Even if it might not show in the stats.

 

[Proust*]

Wayyyyyyyyyyyyyy too much time spent on his hair that could have been spent on strategy and video.

 

[Chairman Maouth]

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.

That was awesome. I learned a lot there - which is remarkable in that I'm a fan of a team in the same division as Edmonton and didn't know half the stuff that someone from Jersey does. And I made sure to read quotes of that in case you were called out on your facts by Oilers fans, but you weren't. Good job.

 

[Kobe Armstrong]

can i see a video of the water incident

 

[ManofSteel55]

Doomed from the beginning? I agree in that no coach would be able to turn the Oilers around in such little time.

What did Edmonton fans hate about Eakins specifically though?

My biggest beef with Eakins is that he was so focussed on implementing his system, even after it was proven to not work. Regardless of whether that system failed because if sucked, or because the players sucked, he refused to adapt to anything that the team might be able to do more effectively. It appeared that he was very "my way or the highway". He also stifled the creativity of our players, also in hopes of getting them to play his "system".

Plus, the arrogance. It just oozed off of him.

 

[McDNicks17]

Wayyyyyyyyyyyyyy too much time spent on his hair that could have been spent on strategy and video.

(Credit to Del Preston for this haha)

 

[Del Preston]

can i see a video of the water incident

He acts like he got hit with acid.

 

[Budddy]

He acts like he got hit with acid.

What a drama queen...

 

[McPuritania]

That was awesome. I learned a lot there - which is remarkable in that I'm a fan of a team in the same division as Edmonton and didn't know half the stuff that someone from Jersey does. And I made sure to read quotes of that in case you were called out on your facts by Oilers fans, but you weren't. Good job.

Why would we call that post out? We aren't clamouring to defend Eakins. In case you didn't know, we hate the guy. FJG's post was exceptional.

 

[Chairman Maouth]

Why would we call that post out? We aren't clamouring to defend Eakins. In case you didn't know, we hate the guy. FJG's post was exceptional.

Boy did you miss the point.

 

[McPuritania]

Boy did you miss the point.

Then enlighten me. It looked like a shot at Oiler fans.

 

[The Nuge]

On the plus side, the players did learn about defense, something they never even tried to do prior to him being signed. So I give him credit for that. Even if it might not show in the stats.

Well that's just not true. Eakins is one of those people that tells you what you want to hear, and does something different. Krueger and Nelson taught/teach defense. Eakins taught how to swarm. Not only did his efforts not show, on the scoreboard, but they didn't show on the ice either. I love how you say nobody tried teaching defense before as if it were some kind of fact. Prior coaches even tried to teach them to PK. Eakins set the team/players back a long ways.



If the word of Oiler fans isn't enough for people, just look at Belov. He left for the KHL, because of Eakins, and said he'd never play for him again. "The other point is that I could have re-signed with Edmonton, but I didn’t want to stay with that coach"
http://m.edmontonsun.com/2014/04/21...ay-in-edmonton-under-head-coach-dallas-eakins

 

[oobga]

Well that's just not true. Eakins is one of those people that tells you what you want to hear, and does something different. Krueger and Nelson taught/teach defense. Eakins taught how to swarm. Not only did his efforts not show, on the scoreboard, but they didn't show on the ice either. I love how you say nobody tried teaching defense before as if it were some kind of fact. Prior coaches even tried to teach them to PK. Eakins set the team/players back a long ways

What Eakins taught in 1.5 seasons (picking out the little specks that were good, because he taught a heck of a lot of bad habit too with his corsi-focused coaching), a real NHL coach could have taught in probably 1 training camp. A training camp Krueger never got and Nelson hasn't had yet. Yet Krueger, with a worse lineup, got more out of his group than Eakins. And Nelson is getting much more out of the same group Eakins had with significant injuries compared to what Eakins had to deal with.

 

[Machinehead]

Can't believe how many Rangers fans wanted this guy.

 

[Chairman Maouth]

Then enlighten me. It looked like a shot at Oiler fans.

It was anything but that.

She had an extraordinary amount of information in her post - some of which I had not heard before. Was it all true? I have no idea. She does sound credible though and explains herself well. But again, was it all true?

I made sure to go through this thread and look for people quoting her to see if any Oilers fans disagreed with her. I used you as fact checkers because I knew you guys would know better than anyone. I saw no complaints from Oilers fans so I assume everything she wrote is true.

My post where I quoted her was 100 benign.

 

[McAsuno]

It was anything but that.

She had an extraordinary amount of information in her post - some of which I had not heard before. Was it all true? I have no idea. She does sound credible though and explains herself well. But again, was it all true?

I made sure to go through this thread and look for people quoting her to see if any Oilers fans disagreed with her. I used you as fact checkers because I knew you guys would know better than anyone. I saw no complaints from Oilers fans so I assume everything she wrote is true.

My post where I quoted her was 100 benign.

She was definitely bang on. There were games where the oilers lost, but Eakins post game would always be about moral victories. Talking about they outshot the other team and other crap. He's way over his head. Under Nelson, his post game losses are more refreshing to hear. There's no BS coming out of his mouth unlike Eakins.

 

[Chairman Maouth]

She was definitely bang on. There were games where the oilers lost, but Eakins post game would always be about moral victories. Talking about they outshot the other team and other crap. He's way over his head. Under Nelson, his post game losses are more refreshing to hear. There's no BS coming out of his mouth unlike Eakins.

It was one of the most detailed posts I've seen here. Eakins sounds like he was every poor coaching quality rolled all into one person - or at least, implemented poorly.

 

[Aceonfire*]

Apparently Petry didn't want an extension because of Eakins. If we had a different coach over the summer, Petry wouldn't be heading to free agency.

Saw this on twitter. Will post links after work.

 

[Pablo Aimar]

He was maybe the worst coach in NHL history. Certainly the worst coach in Oilers history. Nothing really complicated about it.

 

[McAsuno]

It was one of the most detailed posts I've seen here. Eakins sounds like he was every poor coaching quality rolled all into one person - or at least, implemented poorly.

He knew how to talk, but didn't know how to turn that talk as a coach. From his horrible swarm system, to a one man accountability on Yakupov, to the most of the team regressing under him, moral victories, corsi lover, fitness guru, taking donuts away from media questions, destroyed the special teams that were strong under the previous coach Krueger, and finally removing the ping pong table from the oilers room for reasons I don't even know of. It didn't surprise me to see how miserable players looked under him. Now that Nelson's here, the "give a damn" meter is higher, and players look rejuvenated under Nelson ; especially Eberle and Yakupov. Practices have been more high tempo and higher paced, according to the players. If there was a thing I could never stand about Eakins, it was him just standing there all confused, when the other team scores. The only times I've seen him every show any sign of emotions was the water bottle incident. Worst coach I've ever seen AINEC.

Belov didn't want to resign here, because of Eakins. And from what Aceoffire mentioned about Petry, I heard that same comment from the oilers radio guy Stauffer.

 

[Machinehead]

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.

This is a really excellent post. However, my question is, given all these negatives, how was he fairly successful at lower levels? Does it have to do with fear working at lower levels like you mentioned?