Chicago Blackhawks dismiss coach Luke Richardson after another last-place start
It's supposed to be kinda easy to coach a tanking team. You play the most important guys to the future of the organization almost too much, let them rack up points on the power play, and lose a bunch of 4-2 games.
But supposed-to-be doesn't always work out, for a litany of reasons.
That was a straightforward formula in Chicago this season: No one expected them to be any good, and all that mattered was that Connor Bedard, Lukas Reichel, Alex Vlasic, and the rest of the young guys looked like they were moving in the right direction.
What happened instead was that Luke Richardson made a bunch of weird lineup decisions all season, Bedard seemed to regress (in no small part due to those aforementioned lineup decisions), and now has been dismissed.
It must be said that Richardson was not dealt a winning hand by any stretch of the imagination, but also didn't make the most of the situation. Look, for example, at the needless Taylor Hall drama two weeks ago. Poor communication around a healthy scratch isn't new for many teams, but this is a name-brand player going publicly speaking about how taken by surprise he was. It wasn't acrimonious, but it highlights a real issue for veterans. So, too, does the play of Tyler Bertuzzi, who was one of those veterans Chicago pursued over the past few summers to make the team more respectable (and marketable) even as the losing continued. If Richardson couldn't foster growth in his young players — and that obviously includes putting Bedard on the third line at one point for reasons still insufficiently explained — and couldn't get the veterans to play up to their contracts and seemingly couldn't communicate effectively, that had to be that, even with the acknowledgment that wins and losses don't really matter. Losing competitively matters.
Anders Sorenson, up from AHL Rockford, has been named the interim head coach, and his reputation for working well with young players in the organization certainly sets him up to make more of a still-bad situation. At the end of the season, a search for the permanent head coach should begin, perhaps unless Sorenson really impresses in these final 60ish games.
The other thing that needs to be discussed here is that, uh oh, GM Kyle Davidson just burned the first real coaching change of his tenure, letting a guy he hired go after just 190 games, of which the team won 57. They say it's easy to tear down but hard to rebuild and we're seeing now why they say that. The clock now officially seems to be ticking for this management group, especially if a teenager who was supposed to be the next Connor McDavid doesn't start scoring again ASAP.
