Written By Tom Schreier
This is not a coaching thing at all. I like our structure. … I like our team, but we’ve given away a lot of easy points the last month.
— Wild general manager Chuck Fletcher, 1/9/15
With the team mired in a losing streak and his players underachieving, Minnesota Wild head coach Mike Yeo lost it in a very public way. There are three ways to interpret Yeo’s infamous meltdown: One, it’s a coach that’s fed up with his team losing, saw some players feeling sorry for themselves and just lost it. Two, it’s a coach who’s worried about losing his job for the second year in a row and took it out on his team. And three, it was contrived, an effort for Yeo to show fans that he, too, is angry with the team and won’t put up with it any more.
All three interpretations have their merits. The question, really, is how Fletcher interprets it, along with any other dramatic actions the coach takes, as time goes on — especially if the team keeps losing.
It will be up to Fletcher and upper management to decide where to go with Yeo and the Wild. His first order of business will be to get his coach an additional goaltender, but he will be limited in his ability to get one if he wants to keep his core team intact. He cannot go on with the situation he has, and it’s unfair to blame Yeo when he has one young goaltender, Darcy Kuemper, who is being overexposed, and another older one, Niklas Backstrom, who is aging and cannot handle a large workload.
Then he will have to decide if he would rather relieve Yeo of his duties in an attempt to light a fire underneath his team and get his team to sneak into the playoffs, or keep Yeo around for the second year of his contract knowing that the Wild is unlikely to face the adversity it did this year. Yeo had a lot to deal with this year — the mumps outbreak, a debilitating stomach virus and Suter and Parise losing their fathers during the course of the season — and it’s possible that nobody could have gotten this team to win no matter how much experience they had given the circumstances.
It is a critical decision, one that could be the difference between the Wild bringing a Stanley Cup to Minnesota and missing an opportunity to do so in the Parise-Suter era.
Canadian F-bombs
We have to be better. The way we were practicing today, we weren’t practicing with the purpose of getting better.
— Yeo immediately after the meltdown
Personally, I think the meltdown was more or less genuine. Yeo is generally a pretty calm coach who tends to mellow out the locker room rather than set it on fire, so it was unusual for him to swear like he was in a South Park cartoon. Sure, he’s prone to frustration and occasional defensiveness with the media, but he’s more likely to protect a player’s reputation or confidence rather than toss him under the bus. He’s backed his team’s work ethic, character and pride on a consistent basis throughout the year, so this kind of action was out of the norm for him.
He’s not John Tortorella. He’s not gonna go into an opposing locker room to fight a coach, and he’s not known to throw tantrums or just generally tweak out. This is why this was surprising, even given that the Wild are currently in free fall and, for the second year in a row, people are calling for his job.
On the other hand, I can see the argument for the other two interpretations. Wild general manager Chuck Fletcher has reiterated time and time again that Yeo’s job is safe, but everyone in a high-stress job with limited security — no matter how patient upper management is — has to feel a lot of heat, especially when they are in a hockey-mad market like Yeo is. The problem is that if the genesis of this outburst was concern over his own job security, or at least that was the paramount catalyst of his actions, players will recognize this and are liable to tune him out. Yeo may have gotten a 3-year contract extension last year, but most of his best players are signed for longer deals and more money. Zach Parise and Ryan Suter aren’t going anywhere, nor is Mikko Koivu. Thomas Vanek got a 3-year deal for nearly $20 million. Jason Pominville cashed in after coming over from Buffalo. Even Charlie Coyle is on a long-term contract. The players hold the power here — it’s gonna be hard, and very unreasonable, to blow up the team — and everyone knows the old adage: You can’t fire the players, so you fire the coach.
The reason I don’t believe this happened as a result of Yeo worrying about getting fired is because he really could walk away from this job with a lot going for him. Let’s say he gets fired tomorrow: He leaves with an income for the next two years, so he doesn’t have to rush into another job, as well as 3-plus years of coaching experience.
He’d be a prime candidate for a team that is young and patient enough to ride it out until their talent manifests itself. It’s not as though he’d have years to turn things around, but he wouldn’t have two big-money free agents coming in during his second year that are in the prime of their career and expect to win right away. One downside to signing Parise and Suter is that it put a lot of pressure on a young coach to win immediately.
The bottom line is that while nobody wants to be fired from their job, Yeo would for sure land on his feet if he was let go by the Wild.
Finally, there’s people who feel this was all just a show. In some ways, people like Yeo who are calming, supportive and internalize a lot of a team’s shortcomings can be interpreted as soft or just not as passionate as the fans outside the plexiglass. I’ll call this Joe Mauer Syndrome: If you’re not yelling, if you’re not screaming and if you just take it when people trash you, you’re not considered enough of a “competitor” or a “winner” or whatever the word of the day is. Basically, if you’re not Bobby Knight on the sidelines, you just don’t care enough. So Yeo cratered and channelled his inner Bobby Knight, or perhaps his inner Herb Brooks, in an effort to say, “Hey guys, I’m mad at them, too” in an effort of solidarity with the fans that are turning on him with each loss.
If it was an effort to do that, it didn’t work because Yeo has taken some flak for how he ranted. He was not incredibly specific with what he was mad about, at least in terms of technical strategy (it was the team’s general attitude that appeared to set him off), and there was some joking about him swearing with a Canadian accent. “Yeo hits all the key points,” wrote Tom Ley in a Deadspin article simply titled Hockey Coach Mad. “Huffily interrupting a drill to gather his team for some sprints and an ass-chewing, taking a few moments to stare silently with his jaw sticking out before launching into said ass-chewing, and then capping things off with some stick-breaking.
“The heavy Canadian accent really ties it all together, too.”
Again, though, this seems too much of a conspiracy theory to me. While in the back of his mind Yeo had to know he was being watched, and certainly he doesn’t want to come off as someone who is okay with the current state of his team, it seems like a genuine tweak out. “I think Yeozie finally lost it here,” Vanek said afterward. “He’s been pretty good with us, staying upbeat. We played well last night. It’s not good when you lose a hockey game. That was his message. He didn’t like how some of us practiced and came out, so those things happen.”
Beyond that, why would Yeo care what the fans think? As much as the Wild marketing team wants the players and coaches to cater to the fans — and everyone knows who pays their salaries — at the end of the day it’s Fletcher and the Wild brass that will determine whether or not Yeo keeps his job. Fletcher wasn’t at practice that day, nor was owner Craig Leipold, but if he was, it’s not as though he’d go Hey, Mike isn’t tweaking out at his players, he must not care enough, and he isn’t one to cater to the torch and pitchfork masses that inhabit his building or watch his team on television, hoping to burn the losing coach at the stake.
Still, regardless of how you interpret Yeo’s outburst, the fact remains that he hit his panic button — regardless if it was intentional or not — and we’re waiting to see if Fletcher, who has said time and time again that Yeo’s job is safe, will hit his.
Fletcher, the pit boss
I like our group. Every year since I’ve been here, we’ve routinely got outshot, we routinely can’t score goals. We dominate most games we play in, our goal scoring’s getting better. Now we’ve got to get our defensive structure back, get back to the details of the game.
— Fletcher, when asked if he was going to make any major moves, 12/27/14
When Fletcher enters the press elevator to ascend from the arena entrance to the press box, he addresses the elevator operator by name and thanks her on his way out. When he passes by the press secretary, he addresses her by name as well, and does the same with almost everyone he passes by on his way from the elevator to his personal room at the top of the arena, which is located adjacent to the press box.
It is a sign of courtesy, a commitment to knowing the names of the people he associates with on a daily basis and a sign that he does not see himself above anyone else. It is also a sign that he likes to be in the know. Attention to detail is vital for a general manager, and Fletcher’s microscopic focus translates from scouting and evaluation to his life in the arena. It takes a lot effort to remember the name of the person operating the elevator or his press secretary or the people in operations or the members of the press that cover his team.
He could get by without remembering anyone’s name or without speaking to anyone on the way to his personal box, but why would he do that? The Xcel Energy Center is his casino. He knows that running a hockey team is a gamble, one that he pays for with his job if it does not bring in money.
The game itself is predicated on a lot of luck. How many times do you hear a players say, “Well, they got a couple bounces,” or “The bounces didn’t go our way tonight” after a tough loss? What they’re saying is that the team got unlucky — and often they are right. When a puck takes an odd bounce off the boards and ends up on the stick of an opponent in front of your unsuspecting goaltender, that’s bad luck. When a puck is fired towards the net and bounces off your defensive partner’s skate into the goalmouth, that’s bad luck. When your team hits three pipes in the third period of a tied game and you end up losing in overtime, that’s bad luck.
Wild ownership took a lot of risks in order to try and win a Stanley Cup. They spent $98 million each on Suter and Parise. Koivu is on a long-term deal. Pominville and Vanek didn’t come cheap. Coyle, Scandella and Nino Niederreiter were all extended. If you think this team is not willing to take risks just because Fletcher has been adamant that he’s not shaking up the locker room, think again.
This team lost $30 million in the lockout season. We’re not talking chump change here.
You have to commend Fletcher for staying calm amidst the mid-season storm. The Wild stand to lose more money than an Atlantic City casino if they mess up the Suter-Parise era, and in that milieu it would be easy for Fletcher to freak out. Instead, he’s been a calming force at the top. He’s showing that he knows what he’s doing, that as long as he’s in control things are gonna be alright.
He knows he needs to get his coach a goaltender. He knows that ultimately the players have to find it within themselves to play well each night. He knows that firing Yeo won’t automatically turn Vanek into a 40-goal scorer or Koivu into a top line center or keep Kuemper and Backstrom from coughing up easy goals.
The question with Fletcher, though, is how long is he going to keep supporting his coach? Is he willing to punt on this season and try again next year? Who can he really get in net without giving up key cogs to his team (really, Zucker and Granlund should be off the table unless either is unwilling to sign long-term)?
The other factor that goes overlooked is his comfort with Yeo. In him, he has a young coach that came from his system. If he goes out and gets an experienced coach like Dan Bylsma, Randy Carlyle or Pete DeBoer, he relinquishes some control. Sure, he’s the GM that ultimately decides who plays on the team and who coaches it, but experienced coaches tend to do things their way, especially older ones that have had success and might not necessarily agree with the Wild philosophy.
It’s also going to be hard to let Yeo go. This is a long-term relationship dating back to Fletcher’s days with the Penguins organization where he was an assistant GM: Yeo was a former minor league player with the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins before starting his coaching career there. Fletcher took over as the GM of the Wild in 2009 and hired Yeo as the coach of his then-AHL affiliate, the Houston Aeros, before announcing him as head coach in 2011.
These two have been together a while, and a breakup would be painful. Fletcher, like any great GM, looks at the big picture as well as the everyday minutiae. He had to have envisioned a scenario where Yeo would come up, develop as a coach while his players developed on the ice, and they would all hit a peak at the same time and bring multiple championships to Minnesota as a result of their chemistry and loyalty to one another.
It’s a great idea, one that looks great on paper. But things rarely go as planned and occasionally difficult decisions must be made for the better of all parties involved.
The cost of loyalty
Desperate times, like I say, call for desperate measures.
— Jeremy Roenick, following the Wild’s 4-1 loss to Chicago on national television
After the Wild were overwhelmed on national television by the Blackhawks, the team that has eliminated them from the playoffs in the past two years, Roenick came out and said it: Yeo has got to go. While the same thing had been said locally by multiple columnists and radio hosts, this time it was expressed on a prominent national stage.
After channelling his inner Jafar, Roenick addressed the problems Yeo’s team has had during the losing streak: They are not coming out strong, they are not as efficient defensively and they did not respond to a coaching meltdown. This is more than goaltending. This is a talented team that has had success in the past, and when multiple players are underachieving, it’s usually the coach that goes.
The Wild should be a playoff team this year. Yes, the goaltending has been bad, but teams have gotten by in the playoffs with shoddy goaltending as long as they have defensive structure — plus Minnesota will have to add a goaltender this year with or without a new coach. The Western Conference, especially the Central, is stacked this year, but that’s not going to change anytime soon. And of course the mumps and a stomach virus are devastating in a locker room, but winning is all about overcoming adversity.
Loyalty is a wonderful thing, and something that is extremely rare in the world of sports, but being too tied to a coach can be costly. For one, there’s opportunity cost in retaining a coach: If the Wild would have fired Yeo last year when he had his mid-season losing streak, they could have likely picked up Peter Laviolette who won a Stanley Cup with the Carolina Hurricanes in 2006 and took the Philadelphia Flyers to the championship in 2009.
Laviolette currently has the Nashville Predators, a team that, objectively, is significantly less talented than the Wild, in first place in the Central Division.
If they retain Yeo this year, they’ll likely miss out on Dan Bylsma, who won the Stanley Cup with the Penguins in 2008. His Pittsburgh teams have never finished lower than second in their division — in fact, he was fired a year after they finished first place in the Metropolitan Division and two years removed from finishing first in the Eastern Conference.
The year he won the Stanley Cup he took over for a coach who was fired with 25 games left to go in the season.
There’s an argument to retain Yeo: He did well as a minor league coach, he got the team out of the first round last year, he’s done well with young players (Granlund, Scandella, Coyle, Zucker, Niederreiter), et cetera. It’s not like he spraying his team with the mumps or a stomach virus. He can’t force Koivu to be an All-Star or shoot the puck for Vanek. He’s a good person who values character, work ethic and accountability, and he can’t manufacture experience he can’t have.
But if the Wild hold onto Yeo and he never wins a championship, will Fletcher and Wild management look back on it with regret? Will they wonder what would have happened if Laviolette or Bylsma were coaching the team? Would Leipold wonder why he spent $98 million on two players in the prime of their career when he had such an inexperienced coach?
Ultimately, will they look back at the Yeo meltdown and think, Hey, that was a guy under a lot of pressure and lost it? Or will the thought that maybe it was about him, or that it was simply an act to keep the fans on his side, start to creep into their minds?
Fletcher is the man with the panic button. And that’s why he gets paid the big bucks.