You can be bad at running an NHL PP and be a good AHL coach. One doesn't preclude the other.
Doesn't even need to be so specifically stated.
More clearly you can be a good AHL coach, and a bad NHL coach, period. One does not preclude the other.
Because they are very different motivational things.
In AHL the coach has the benefit of having players in subordinate position that are dependent on the AHL coach (in most orgs) to develop, and get to their goal of playing with the NHL club. In that way the AHL coach has so much more authority over their select group of players that an NHL coach has.
In the NHL coaches (most) are in a subordinate position to players and certainly rookie coaches are. This is a completely different dynamic. As Eakins perfectly demonstrated the same controlling bootcamp rhetoric that worked for him in the AHL didn't work here at least partly because he didn't realize (how couldn't he) that he was going to be subordinate to the players, here, at this level.
For a guy that claims he was always "up in the stands paying attention" Eakins is pretty dumb. The first thing I stated was his gongshow bootcamp approach (along with coach Ference being sidekick) was going to fail miserably and the players would consider it a joke.
You can't be a kick ass NHL coach with zero earned NHL cred and without the kind of backup that would see you through any misfires.
Keenan did it but he was a lot more astute than Eakins and had the full faith of the Flyers org and the players. He was a match for those teams.