A Name Never Mentioned

With the NHL currently winding down its season, the NHL coaching carousel seems to be heating up with more and more names being linked to the potential head coaching jobs. Names like Trotz, Cassidy, Tocchet, and DeBoer have been linked to a number of teams in terms of job interviews, but all of them remain unemployed for the time being. There's one man, though, whose name never is mentioned despite him having a Jack Adams Award and a Memorial Cup as a coach to his name, and that's Ted Nolan. How is it that Nolan, whose teams always played hard and played well, never found himself as a long-term head coach anywhere after serving his second season with the New York Islanders in 2008? What would stop a team from reaching out and speaking to Nolan to see if the passion to coach in the NHL was still there?

I don't know if Ted Nolan would be good fit in a place like Winnipeg or Detroit or Philadelphia. I personally don't know Ted Nolan nor have I met him. I do know that he's been to four Memorial Cup Finals in his career - three with Sault Ste. Marie and one with Moncton - and he won the 1997 Jack Adams Award Trophy. Outside of Barry Trotz, there isn't a coach sitting idly on the sidelines with the same credentials that Nolan has, yet it seems that his phone simply doesn't ring when an NHL team needs a bench boss.

CTV's W5 and TSN's Rick Westhead dug into the reasons why Ted Nolan may not be coaching in the NHL any longer back on January 30, 2021, and it's a sobering look at how one man has been blacklisted from the NHL coaching ranks despite all the success he's had. It should be noted that the video below also looks at the racism that Nolan has experienced as a player and coach, and there are rumours that this may also factor in why he's no longer on an NHL bench. I can't say this is certain, but the evidence presented by W5 and Westhead makes it hard to ignore.

Here's the examination done by W5 and Westhead in its entirety. It's 21:26 in length, but it's a great look at a guy who turned down a few chances while being ignored for other opportunities.

Assuming that everything in the video is true, there are a couple of bombshells in that reporting. If everything is as it was told, it seems that the Sabres were determined to have Pat Lafontaine play games while concussed if it weren't for Nolan, and that the Sabres were instructed to lose in 2015 when it came to earning the best opportunity to draft first-overall. Both allegations should make hockey fans uneasy.

The Lafontaine part is sickening when one considers that the François Leroux hit that Lafontaine suffered was the beginning of the end of Lafontaine's career. Following Leroux's hit, concussions and concussion-related problems plagued Pat Lafontaine's remaining career for three seasons until he finally announced his retirement from the game on October 12, 1999. I doubt that many around the Sabres will remember it as Nolan did, but it seems that Lafontaine confirms at least part of Nolan's story, if not all of it.

The second account where the Sabres instructed Nolan to lose games in order to earn a better draft position in the 2015 NHL Entry Draft is also quite bothersome. As we know from history, Connor McDavid was selected first-overall by the Edmonton Oilers while the Sabres selected Jack Eichel second-overall that season, and there were whispers that the Sabres may be trying to tank based on some of their moves that season.

The final straw came when Buffalo Sabres fans cheered when Sam Gagner scored an overtime goal against the Sabres in Buffalo on March 26, 2015 that guaranteed the Sabres would finish dead-last in the NHL, guaranteeing them one of the top-two picks in the draft. Nolan, for what its worth, was fired on April 12, 2015.

Those two events aside, one has to wonder why Nolan is still watching games from the couch rather than an NHL bench. He's shown he has the skill to coach at a high level and have his teams perform exceptionally well, so it's hard to understand the reasons if they're performance-based. If the reasons are even close to being racially-based, the NHL has a lot of explaining to do when they claim that "hockey is for everyone"

I'll let you decide after watching the W5 report.

Until next time, keep your sticks on the ice!