The results never match the narrative.
There is a scene in the movie Moneyball where Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane, played by Brad Pitt, is sitting around in a meeting with all of his scouts going over minor league players that might help them fill the void left by the departure of first baseman Jason Giambi.
All of the scouts are going over all of the positive traits owned by a particular prospect, making their passionate pleas for why THIS guy is the one to come in and replace a franchise icon.
An obviously frustrated Beane (Pitt) then utters one of my favorite lines from any sports movie:
“If he’s a good hitter, why doesn’t he hit good?”
I know it’s a dramatization. I know it probably did not play out exactly like that. But it was such a simple, devastating line that should have been asked by everybody else sitting at the table. It is also a line that should probably be asked in real life situations in sports when evaluating anybody for their role, whether it be front office personnel, coaches or players.
If you’re as good as they say you are …. where is the proof? Where is the evidence? What backs up the claim?
I have this thought process when it comes to the idea of Rick Tocchet as an NHL head coach.
Especially now that the Pittsburgh Penguins have a head coaching opening, and since Tocchet is available and is one of the hottest names on the coaching market.
If he’s a good coach, why aren’t his teams better?
I have nothing against Tocchet. He has had a long, successful career in the NHL as both a player and an assistant. He obviously has very close ties to Pittsburgh given that he won a Stanley Cup here as a player and then won two more as an assistant coach. There are not many people in Penguins history that have three Stanley Cups with the Penguins (or any one franchise), but he is one of them.
And I respect that.
And I respect the work he did as an assistant coach in Pittsburgh.
But being an assistant coach is a very different animal and a very different beast than being a head coach. Professional sports, across all leagues, are full of people that are highly successful and very good in one role, but not quite as good in the other role. And that’s okay. It’s not a slight. It’s not an insult. It’s just … reality.
The thing that I find so incredible in the Tocchet discussion is the gap in perception from the people in hockey (who love him), and the people outside of hockey (who don’t see why the people in hockey love him), and the actual results his teams have produced (usually not good).
He has been a head coach for seven full seasons in the NHL.
Two of those teams made the playoffs, and one of them did so in the first Covid season when 24 teams qualified. His Arizona team that made the playoffs ranked 22nd in the NHL and would have missed by a wide margin in a normal playoff field.
I can not think of many coaches that have had that sort of track record and would still be this highly regarded.
The counter to that is going to be “but look at the teams he was coaching. They were not very good.”
And that IS a fair counter point.
He was taking over in Tampa Bay following the Barry Melrose nightmare, and at a time when the Lightning were a mess of a franchise due to an utterly insane ownership situation.
Tough environment.
But that team was also a game away (one goal away) from the Stanley Cup Final the year after he left.
Arizona was a brutal set of circumstances for everybody. Maybe that was an impossible situation. It probably was.
His best season as a head coach came a year ago in Vancouver when the Canucks exceeded pretty much every expectation anybody had, finished with a top-10 record in the league and made the playoffs.
And then it was followed up by an absolutely cataclysmic season that saw the team regress by 17 points in the standings, have their two best forwards hate each other so much that the team had to trade one of them (and nearly both of them), their best and most important young forward lose all confidence and production, all while the President of Hockey Ops talked about the team’s best player eventually wanting to play with his brothers …. who play in New Jersey.
Hey, look. Maybe that’s a mess, too. Maybe that’s dysfunctional. But I don’t fully understand how Tocchet got so much of the credit for the 2023-24 season, but escaped so much of the blame for the 2024-25 season.
It is his team, after all. He is the coach.
Let’s just look at some numbers.
These are the seven full seasons (excluding the two years he took over a team halfway through) Tocchet has been a head coach in the NHL and what each team did during 5-on-5 play in terms of goals scored, goals against and expected goals, as well as their spot in the standings.
Teams in bold are the playoff teams.
The Canucks had excellent defensive metrics the past two seasons, which would be a big positive mark in Tocchet’s favor. Perhaps even where the argument for him begins.
Goaltending and specifically the injury to Thatcher Demko absolutely ruined a lot of those defensive gains.
But the offense.
The offense in all of those seasons.
There is just … none of it. And I know in the Arizona years specifically there was not a ton of offensive talent on those rosters, but those Vancouver teams should have had more scoring punch, yes?
It’s also fascinating to see the before and after when he took over in Vancouver for Bruce Boudreau midway through the 2022-23 season.
It is an interesting comparison because when it comes to the goals scored and goals against, it was a complete 180 in both areas.
They defended a lot better.
They scored a lot less.
So if we are just using his Vancouver years as a barometer given that they are the most recent examples of him as a head coach, I think you can put together — objectively speaking — a pretty compelling argument that his teams tend to defend well.
Granted, that team also has Quinn Hughes on it, and when Quinn Hughes has not been on the ice those expected goals against numbers became a lot more mediocre. But the overall numbers still matter.
Coaching is a hard thing to evaluate when you are not sitting in the room or behind the bench.
Sometimes a lot of what we perceive to be good or bad coaching is just goaltending.
Sometimes talent can overcome it.
Sometimes coaches do bring out more in teams.
And I can get behind the idea that in Tocchet’s case he has not always been in an ideal situation as the top guy. But a lot of coaches throughout hockey history have been in those situations. Not all of them keep getting more opportunities. Not all of them are universally hyped up.
What is it about Tocchet that puts him on a different level?
Players seem to like him. Media loves him. Teams clearly like him because he’s been hired by three of them, Vancouver desperately tried to keep him, and somebody is going to hire him on this cycle.
Should it be the Penguins?
The Penguins could certainly use some defensive structure and somebody that can bring that out of them.
Maybe Tocchet can.
But how would the offense develop? How would the young players develop? Steven Stamkos had his first breakout year under Tocchet in Tampa Bay. Elias Pettersson had his worst year under Tocchet in Vancouver. Clayton Keller did not become a top-line scorer until after Tocchet left Arizona.
Again, it comes back to how we know what good coaching is and isn’t. It’s hard to quantify. Sometimes all we have to go by is results. In this case, the results rarely match the narrative.