My guess is that management have a plan for a situation like this. I am all for Alfie being behind the bench. This is a guy who's been in the trenches before and he is the perfect person to be paired with Green. I think players like Tkachuk really respect Alfie and know what he means to our fan base, and this will help shape Tkachuk into the leader our team needs. I am pretty excited that he'll be coaching again, honestly, especially because of Alfie's penchant for details and making our team detail oriented.
this year was different, Jacques brought him in as a "co-coach".
The reality of assistant coaches is: a grind. Do the dirty work. Scotty Bowman use to use them in a real nasty way. Like: Find a way to improve our faceoff wins. So the Assistants had a short amount of time to conceive of an idea, test it, implement it and IT BETTER WORK.
Assistants work long hours and better be able to solve hard problems. It is the assistant who has to get the PP to work. He needs to solve it. He needs to spend the hours working with the players.
I hope that Alfie is okay with "slave labour". It's the assistants that are doing room checks when the team is on the road, and running practices and doing video and doing every dirty task. HCs are the brains/big picture. Assistants are the workers. And I hope he is okay with it for 2-4 years.