Chiarelli, seen above in 2015, had his tenure ended midway through his fourth season at the helm.AMBER BRACKEN/The Associated Press
Peter Chiarelli was fired as general manager during the Edmonton Oilers’ latest loss at Rogers Place on Tuesday night. The team was trailing when he was terminated between the second and third periods.
It may seem callous, but it was done that way to let Chiarelli depart with dignity intact.
“I felt it was right,” Bob Nicholson, Edmonton’s chief executive officer, said Wednesday. “He could leave the building in the way he felt fit.”
Chiarelli’s tenure ended midway through his fourth season at the helm. He built a Stanley Cup winner in Boston but was dismissed with the Oilers in next-to-last place in the NHL’s Pacific Division.
“He was disappointed because he really felt he had let the organization down by not having the team in the playoffs,” Nicholson said during a news conference at the Oilers home rink.
He announced Chiarelli’s firing in a room where a stick wielded by Wayne Gretzky and gloves worn by Mark Messier are displayed. There is much history here, and now just as much heartbreak.
“We felt Peter had made all of the moves he could make and it was time to move in a different direction,” Nicholson said. “Some of the moves he made did not work.”
Keith Gretzky, who has served as Chiarelli’s assistant, will take over as interim GM with oversight from Nicholson. Gretzky is the brother of the Oilers vice-chairman and Hall of Famer whose statue stands in front of the team’s arena.
“Keith is going to be the point person, but we will use all of our assets before we make any deals,” Nicholson said. “We are not in a rush to get a general manager. We want to get the right one.”
Keith Gretzky becomes the Oilers’ fourth GM in six seasons. In the past decade, they have had seven head coaches. They won five Stanley Cups over a seven-year stretch, but their last was in 1990.
“There is something in the water here we haven’t got right,” Nicholson said.
Edmonton has made the playoffs only once in the past dozen years and is struggling again despite having the game’s best player in Connor McDavid. The Oilers came within one victory of reaching the semi-finals in 2017 but have since lost more often than they have won.
“We thought we had really turned the page and then we fell back,” Nicholson said.
Crowds at Rogers Place have been unusually sparse, and Nicholson said season-ticket holders are frustrated by the perpetually sad state of the team.
The Oilers finished the first half with three losses in four days and nine of their past 11 at home. They are 5-12 in their past 17 games over all.
Nicholson said a decision to replace Chiarelli during the all-star break was reached days ago. The team has 10 days off before its next game.
Ken Hitchcock will remain head coach through the end of the season. The third-winningest coach in NHL history was hired in November after Todd McLellan was ousted. McLellan was hired shortly after Chiarelli became GM in April of 2015. Chiarelli had been fired nine days earlier after the Bruins missed the playoffs for the first time in seven years.
He will be remembered most in Edmonton for his failure to build a winning team around McDavid – and for making a series of bad decisions.
He traded away Taylor Hall and Jordan Eberle, two of the franchise’s marquee players. In the summer of 2016, he signed Milan Lucic to a seven-year deal worth US$42-million that the team regrets. The big winger lost his scoring touch so badly that he had only three goals for the entire 2018 calendar year.
Chiarelli’s final move raised eyebrows again. On Monday, the team announced it had signed Mikko Koskinen, a goalie with 31 games’ experience in the NHL, to a three-deal worth US$13.5-million beginning next year.
Koskinen has wrestled the starting job away from Cam Talbot, the goalie that took the team on its last playoff run in 2016-17 and won a league-best 42 games. Edmonton is now left to use him as a backup and as trade bait while paying out the remainder of the US$4.2-million he is owed through the end of the season.
The Oilers suffered a lopsided defeat at the hands of their provincial rivals from Calgary on Saturday night, and played dreadfully in the past two games against Carolina and Detroit.
They trailed Carolina 6-1 on Sunday before scoring a few inconsequential goals in the third period, and fell to the Red Wings 2-0 on Tuesday. Neither is likely to reach the postseason and both should have been easily dispatched with on home ice.
Nicholson said there are no plans to trade any key players, and that the organization has no desire to deal away its first-round draft pick this summer.
“We are not going to give away the future,” he said.
Despite its uninspiring performance so far, Oilers management still believes the team can make the playoffs.
“We have a lot of work to do, but we have good leaders and good players,” Nicholson said. “We can be a real good team, but we haven’t shown that consistently.
“I truly believe we are not in a rebuild. We have the best player in the world and other good pieces.”
The team was told minutes after Tuesday’s game that Chiarelli had been fired. Afterward, the dressing room was quiet. Players struggled to hide their disappointment.
“Yesterday was a very tough day for the organization,” Nicholson said. “It was really felt that because of the way we were trending we had to make a change.”
Marty Klinkenberg