About the only way you couldn’t have heard today’s breaking news is if you were in a nuclear bomb shelter. This shouldn’t have come as a shock as unfortunate as it is, but after Tuesday night’s shellacking in Colorado, the writing was on the wall.
The Dispatch has been all over this from the moment the story broke around 4:00pm today:
A season after leading the Blue Jackets to their first playoff appearance, Ken Hitchcock has been fired.
Hitchcock, 58, will be replaced on an interim basis by assistant coach Claude Noel.
After helping rejuvenate the franchise over the previous two seasons, Hitchcock has been unable to stop a protracted slide, which began in late November and has the Jackets sitting 14th in the Western Conference standings. They are 10-20-7 since Nov. 19 and 22-26-9 overall.
Obviously this season has not gone to plan in any way shape or form, and in professional sports, putting blame strictly on the players only goes so far. Here’s Captain Rick Nash’s comments:
“It’s terrible news,” Jackets captain Rick Nash said. “It’s terrible news, it’s terrible we couldn’t play better, and the coach had to be fired. Hitch put this market on the map. We didn’t really have an identity before he got here.”
Some will site Hitchcock’s mismanagement of young players, especially the class-act Nikita Filatov. The Globe and Mail’s Matthew Sekeres believes that Howson came to the realization a while ago:
At the world junior championship in Saskatchewan last month, Filatov represented Russia and made it clear – without saying so directly – that he had no interest in playing for Hitchcock ever again. That week, I spoke with Blue Jackets GM Scott Howson and again it was clear that, ultimately, he was going to have to decide between his coach and his best prospect.
Personally, I knew that it was only a matter of time before the move was made. The loss to the Avalanche finally pushed me to the edge of the abyss… knowing what awaited in the coming weeks days hours. The world of the Blue Jackets was rocked by a disaster, but like a city or a nation, we will rebuild.
To me, Ken Hitchcock was the first person with the CBJ I really got into and cared about. I knew Rick Nash, Rusty Klesla, Sergei Fedorov, Adam Foote, etc., but many of those players on the team were leftovers of the previous season and the Doug Maclean mess. In a sense, I bought into Ken Hitchcock. Yeah I went to games before Hitch was the coach and yes, we probably lost a lot more often than we won when I went. But Hitchcock came and gave everyone a new hope for the seemingly endless years of losing. But like all good things, they must come to an end, and Hitch’s run in Columbus has reached that point.
Puck Daddy’s Greg Wyshynski believes that this move was made due to a complete breakdown of management:
No question, this move is a desperation attempt at trying to turn around the fortunes of the team on the ice, which in turn brings in the kinds of revenues the team saw during its playoff run last year.
But it also refocuses a ton of scrutiny on Howson, who had received praise for the patient construction of the roster and retaining the services of Rick Nash(notes), but whose below-average, wafer thin blue line (check the depth chart) may be one of the primary reasons the team fell apart this season defensively. (Although let’s not downplay Mason’s role in that mess, either. He’s been terrible.)
Without a doubt, this is a big deal not just in Columbus, but across the NHL. One can hope that Hitch may finally be stress-free for a few nights and that the Jackets can begin the gradual move back towards respectability.
