Wild firing given what he had to work with. Akim Aliu hiring incoming? Realized he is a terrible player so why not let him be the coach when they have no chance of winning anything. Unreal PR stunt.
It's curious that a thread on news of a coach firing, you bring up Aliu on a PTO with the AHL team. You're really telling on yourself with this sort of response.
Sure, but you are assuming that he was fired due to a lack of trust.
Grier has done things in his short time in the GM role that are not very common, his judgement deserves some scrutiny.
I'd be glad to discuss what things that aren't very common that deserve some scrutiny. Grier has done a lot of good moves for the organization and a lot of them were clearly very difficult to manufacture given the contracts at play.
Eaxactly my thoughts.
I mean aure they were beyond terrible, but how can you put that blame on the coach when he had THAT roster to work with.
He's not and the fans aren't putting blame on Quinn for the team's lack of talent. That's not why he got canned. The reality is that the Sharks likely never intended on keeping Quinn past his three year deal. Now that he's going into that final year after two horrendous seasons, keeping a coach like that where the team is just riding out his contract is not going to be a productive development season for the players. That's just the business of coaching in the NHL for a rebuilding team.
Sharks aren't contending for several years so the coach should be evaulated on his ability to help players develop. If they don't believe he is the guy to do that he needed to go.
That's if your team is in the player development phase of a rebuild predominantly. This Sharks team wasn't set up like that. This team was going to lose and a lot. They did a lot to prevent kids from playing in the NHL because they knew how ugly it was going to get and wanted short term more mature players to take on the tensions of losing like they were going to. That's why they only really had three guys on a development track playing in the NHL for this season. Everyone else was a vet or someone getting potentially their last shot at being an NHL'er. When you have that many fringe players in your lineup on the regular, player development is still taking a back seat.
Quinn is the fall guy for the last two seasons but it was always going to be that way as they were rebuilding. The most likely reason that Quinn was let go by Grier now is because they don't want a lameduck coach going into the final year of his contract coaching a team that will have more focus on player development because a lot of the cap dumps are coming off the books. If the Sharks luck out to land Celebrini in the draft, he's probably going to be in San Jose come October. Maybe that also means that Will Smith follows. Either way, the centerpiece to your next competitive team will need development and that's going to require player buy-in. A lameduck coach that has lost 60 or more games in each of the past two seasons is not going to be the best guy to get that out of a new group.