Maybe the timing was just a coincidence, but there seemed to be a little serendipity associated with the Washington Capitals' decision to pull the plug on Glen Hanlon's three-plus seasons as their head coach the morning after a lopsided 5-1 loss to the Atlanta Thrashers.
These were the same Thrashers who began the NHL season with a 0-6 record and looked hopelessly lost, a team going nowhere fast. General manager Don Waddell, sensing that the players were awaiting a move behind the bench, obliged them before things got too late by firing Bob Hartley and stepping in as the coach on an interim basis.
The results have been wildly successful. Ilya Kovalchuk awoke from an early-season slumber and has been positively on fire offensively. Johan Hedberg stepped in for injured No. 1 goaltender Kari Lehtonen and solidified the team's goaltending. A Thrashers team with more than its share of holes (no real frontline centre nad a cast of journeymen anchoring the blueline) edged over .500 with the win over the Capitals.
At 11-10-0, they are in a tie with three other Eastern Conference teams for sixth place overall - and if the playoffs started today, they would qualify for postseason play.
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The Capitals, meanwhile, started reasonably well - they were 3-2 when the Thrashers fired Hartley - but have been in a tailspin ever since, losing five in a row, nine of the past 10 and sinking to the bottom of the NHL overall standings.
At a certain point, general manager George McPhee had little choice but to make a change behind the bench. He replaced popular Hanlon (their personal history dates back to their days together in the Vancouver Canucks' organization) with Bruce Boudreau, the former Leaf who, at the age of 52, and after exceptional successes in the minor leagues as both a player and a coach, gets to handle an NHL bench for the first time.
Boudreau was promoted from the Capitals' farm team in Hershey on an interim basis. It makes sense for the Capitals to wait and see whether he has the right stuff to coach on a full-time basis in the NHL (his résumé suggests he does) before sifting through the available candidates who are looking for work (Pat Quinn, another Canucks alumni, and Dave King, who knows something about how to handle Russian players, would be two prime candidates if the Boudreau experiment doesn't pan out).
The Capitals' primary downfall was their lack of scoring, a perplexing problem given that they signed a couple of decent free agents in the off-season (Michael Nylander and Viktor Kozlov) and brought over promising Swedish rookie Nicklas Backstrom, who isn't quite lighting it up in the same way as the Chicago Blackhawks' dynamic duo of Patrick Kane and Jonathan Toews. It didn't help Hanlon that Alexander Semin, who had a 38-goal, 73-point last year on behalf of the Caps, has been limited to only four games because of injury and scored his first goal of the season last Monday.
Alexander Ovechkin, with 13 goals in 19 games, remains about the only reason to come out and watch the Capitals play this season.
Ovechkin and Sidney Crosby came into the league together right after the lockout and Crosby helped propel the Pittsburgh Penguins into the playoffs last season, in only his second year in the league. This year, the Penguins were also slow coming out of the gate - 13th overall and a dismal 2-7-1 in their past 10 games - proving again that despite the presence of dominating skilled players, hockey remains the ultimate team game. If the goaltending falters, or the special teams struggle or the supporting cast isn't up to the job, even the most dynamic and precocious of talents cannot do it all themselves.
So with Hanlon out and Boudreau in, the Capitals hope they can execute a Thrashers-like turnaround - and that the new voice calling them to attention today will help salvage what was rapidly turning into another lost season on the Beltway.
Capitals owner Ted Leonsis is the AOL gazillionaire, who bought the team from Abe Polin years ago and remains a committed fan. He is also an avid blogger, and on Tuesday morning, after another home loss to divisional rival Florida Panthers, Leonsis posted a short note summing up his feelings this way: "I can't sleep. I was up at 4:30 a.m. this morning. I am in pain. I am angry. I want desperately for us to turn it around and win some games, as does everyone in our organization. I am not oblivious to what is happening."
That was probably the writing on the wall for Hanlon. Rumours of a coaching change swirled around before Wednesday's game and when the Capitals crashed in the second period - as they have so many times of late, a sign of just how fragile their confidence is - the chants of "Fire Hanlon" became louder than they'd ever been.
Afterward, Hanlon conceded he'd never undergone anything quite like the meltdown at any other stage in his career, as a player or a coach, and sounded as if he were out of answers. So Boudreau gets the first chance to pick up the pieces, and in a month or so, McPhee will start to get his answers: whether this were really a coaching issue, or whether the team he's rebuilding is ready to turn the corner just yet.
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