Back to the booth: Tampa Bay Lighting fire coach Barry Melrose

The new owners of the Tampa Bay Lightning, Oren Koules and Len Barrie, have no idea how to run a hockey team.  They overspent on a number of veteran free agents, and it hasn’t paid off as the Lighting offense has been dismal.  They resigned the team’s all time scoring leader, Vincent Lecavalier, to an 11 year, $85 million contract extension.  In their most daring move, however, the lured Barry Melrose out of the broadcast booth and back behind the bench after thirteen years away from coaching.  The team has struggled to a 5-7-4 record in the early part of the NHL season, and on Friday General Manager Brian Lawton announced that Melrose had been fired only 16 games in to his return to coaching.

Melrose certainly knows hockey, but hiring a coach that had been away from the game in that capacity for well over a decade was an ill-advised move from the beginning.  The horrible personnel decisions by the hands-on (some would say “meddlesome”) new owners left him in a no-win situation.  The last straw was apparently a Tuesday team meeting where Melrose reportedly called a lot of his veteran players on the carpet and then left to let assistant coach Rick Tocchet run practice.  This isn’t an uncommon thing for coaches to do in the NHL, but for some reason the Lightning’s owners decided it was a sign to swing the axe.

Tocchet will take over as head coach for the time being, and he emphasized that Melrose’s actions on Tuesday weren’t a big deal:

"Sometimes guys get tired of hearing him and he gets tired of hearing them. Every coach does that. You need a break, have to get away from the team for a second. I honestly don't think it's that big a deal. It really isn't."

Despite the appearance to the contrary, GM Lawton claims that the Tocchet run practice wasn’t the catalyst for Melrose’s dismissal:

"He was not let go because he let Tocchet run practice. It was a culmination of things that had been building since the start of the season, and possibly before.”

"For me, it's not about the wins and losses every night. ... It's certainly part of the equation, but it's not all of it. It has to do with philosophically where we're going, where we're at today, where we're going tomorrow and where we're going to be in three months or a year."

Translation—“the clueless ownership of the team made a mistake hiring Melrose in the first place and instead of living with it we took this opportunity to throw him under the bus.”

Lawton did praise Melrose, and based on his comments it sounds like the coach was let go because they couldn’t dump their overpaid free agent signees as easily:

"This was a tough decision to make. Barry is a good man and we have a great deal of respect for him. We wish him nothing but success. However, the results were unacceptable and the players have to understand that we need to be better. Hopefully this change helps push them.

"Myself, certainly the players and the rest of our staff, we all have to take responsibility for this as well. It's a difficult job. Ultimately, you have one person that's paying the price for a lack of deliverance on performance for a number of people, or a team in this case."

Melrose’s future plans aren’t known at the moment, but since he’s a world class broadcaster there’s every reason to think he’ll land on his feet.  The same thing, unfortunately, can’t be said for the Tampa Bay Lightning.