All year, the Vegas Golden Knights have struggled to live up to preseason expectations. The results speak for themselves– this will be the first season in franchise history that the team will finish with more losses than wins. And with a 5-10-2 record since returning from the Olympic break, it was time to do something drastic.
Desperate times call for desperate measures. On Sunday, the Golden Knights announced that they’d relieved Bruce Cassidy of his duties and named John Tortorella head coach.
Firing a head coach with eight games remaining in the regular season isn’t unprecedented, but it is highly irregular. But this is a business that prioritizes results, and the Golden Knights weren’t getting the results they needed. General manager Kelly McCrimmon said so himself when he spoke to the media on Monday following the coaching change.
“We went into the Olympic break in first place,” said Golden Knights general manager Kelly McCrimmon. “We’d been in first place for 96 days. Since then, we’re 5-10-2. We’ve gone from first to second to third to fighting for a playoff spot. We waited as long as we could on this; we see lots of positive signs in spurts in our game. But we just felt that we needed to bring a different person in to lead our team at this time.
“If we didn’t have the expectations and the belief in our team that we do, we probably would’ve let this thing ride out,” McCrimmon finished. “We like our team a lot. We think our team has a chance to win, and we needed to make this change to help that happen.”
McCrimmon attested that he didn’t speak to the players before making the change, and shut down the idea that Cassidy ‘lost the room.’
“You know, ‘lost the room’ is something I’ve been seeing and reading, but no, I don’t think that. I think that the energy level, for me, wasn’t there,” said McCrimmon. “I think somewhere along the way, we lost our spirit. And we lost our energy as a team.”
McCrimmon feels that the Golden Knights are a better team than their results would show, but reiterated that this is a ‘results business.’ And, historically, this is a team that only accepts the best results.
“You need to make hard decisions,” McCrimmon said. “And the easiest thing in the world to do is nothing, right?”