Yesterday, we talked about how the players of the Columbus Blue Jackets let the organization down this year. They weren't at their best for most of the season, and it resulted in their general manager pressing the nuclear button halfway through the campaign.
On January 12th, with his team sitting at the very bottom of the Eastern Conference, Don Waddell fired head coach Dean Evason, along with assistant coach Steve McCarthy. He replaced Evason with Rick Bowness, McCarthy with nobody, and the team quickly responded by playing their best stretch of hockey in years.
Any time a team has to fire a coach in the middle of the season, it's a bad sign. That was definitely the case for the Blue Jackets this year, especially considering the fact that Evason only had a year and half with the organization.
It's not that Evason is a bad coach. Though, it may have appeared that way right after the change was made, because this team took off. But, more so, I think his style wasn't the right fit for this franchise. In hindsight, he was the wrong guy to hire in the first place. I think Waddell would even admit that.
Evason relied on his assistant coaches to do a lot of the day-to-day coaching, and that was his downfall. The assistants did him no favors-especially in their own end. Simple facts here, we have long been critical of McCarthy's guidance for this team's defense corps. I will never understand why he was retained for so long, despite this team's obvious lack of improvement in their own end.
Somehow, McCarthy held his job through four head coaches and two general managers. It's honestly impressive, especially considering that he was probably directly responsible for a lot of the mess that was going on here. After all, this team giving up a ton of goals was the issue for his entire tenure here.
Back to the main point: Evason was brought in to lead this team out of the bottom and into playoff contention. He did that, but this year, the team was unable to take any more steps forward under his guidance. The D zone again held them back, with the team allowing 3.44 goals per game on average.
Evason wasn't getting through to them, the motivation was gone, and the X's and O's were not good enough. So, Waddell made the big change behind the bench, trying to drag his team out of the doldrums.
Rick Bowness turned it around, but it still collapsed at the end.
After the coaching change, the Blue Jackets caught fire, winning 10 of 11 games before the Olympic break and finding themselves right back in the playoff race. They were able to carry that over and keep playing at a high level for a few weeks, but eventually things tapered off.
Bowness had this team playing like a well-oiled machine in no time. But the reality was, it was just a "new head coach" bump after all. They won only 2 of their final 11 games of the year, finishing with the same number of wins (40) as last year, but with three more points (92).
Still, it feels like this was a positive change for the team. Under Bowness, the Jackets were 21-11-5, earning 47 points in 37 games. If you extrapolate that out over a full season, it's 104 points-which would be the second most in franchise history.
No secret where things improved. The Jackets brought their goals against average down to 2.59 per game under Bowness, but the scoring fell off a cliff over the last few weeks of the season. Had things not dried up at the other end, we may be discussing a different topic today.
Since the team's results were so drastically different on either end of the coaching change, we have to grade both benches separately. It was a tale of two seasons in Columbus, after all.
The Dean Evason coaching staff: F. The Rick Bowness coaching staff: B. Overall grade: C-.
This team was a lot better after January 12th, but it still wasn't enough to salvage the season. So, as a whole, the Blue Jackets get a barely passing grade for their coaching staff. A slight improvement in the standings year-over-year wasn't good enough, but it also wasn't the end of the world. After all, at least the problem was corrected before it went on for too long. More on that in our management review tomorrow.
It will be interesting to see if the other assistant coaches are brought back under Bowness next season. That may tell more of the story in regards to what happened in the CBJ locker room this year.
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