oobga
Tier 2 Fan
- Aug 1, 2003
- 23,459
- 18,702
He was maybe the worst coach in NHL history. Certainly the worst coach in Oilers history. Nothing really complicated about it.
He was the kind of coach where everyone could see he was in over his head less than a month on the job. Guys like that pop up now and then, but they usually get canned very quickly. Oilers had special circumstances though where MacT put his reputation on the line backstabbing Krueger to hire Eakins to a 4 year contract. MacT gets a pretty much infinitely long leash from Kevin Lowe and Katz, so MacT was able to just wait and wait and wait for Eakins to figure things out and make moves to try to work around his terrible coaching until he had no choice but to fire him.
Because of that special circumstance that let him keep his job so long, I think it allowed Eakins to coach long enough to be in the discussion as one of the worst coaches of all time, When normally he would have only been a tiny forgettable blip (fired after 1-2 months) on the NHL coaching radar.