Re: Northeastern Huskies 2014-15: Release the Hounds!
Anyway, lots of post game arm chair right wings out there tonight and the discourse is good. Clearly, this isn't a great team by any stretch of the imagination, but it also may not be as bad as we thought either. With a healthy Witt, better D and more clicking K Roy and others we can certainly play better than our record to date would indicate and to do that we have to just take them one at a time and climb out of the hole.
We have a big test home and away with PC and I will be in attendance on Wednesday. These games, are perhaps the most important games left before the break as if we can win them, it will do wonders for the team confidence.
I do think the Gophers may have taken us a bit too lightly which is to be expected coming off a big win at BC and perhaps a long day of travel from the Twin Cities.
There are lots of glass 1/2 full guys on here and that's fine, but there are also lots of realists, who like myself, have been following the team religiously over perhaps 20, 30 and even 40 seasons of hard-ache now, and we expect more.
I also judge success in wins over BC, BU and Beanpots and until we do that more than but once in a blue moon I won't be fondly on board with JM or any other coach.
So, here is the history as I know it to be, in the event that you are a 18 to 30 year old, with blinders on or your eyes closed, this is the issue, and has existed long before Madigan.
I knew and I liked Fern, and he liked me. He was a players coach but a vast majority of his early tenure was spent in ECAC league play in the 1970’s where the team was mediocre at best and sometimes downright awful. However, to his credit, he hit his coaching stride in his 50‘s in the 10 years form 1979 to 1989 the team was pretty dan good in both ECAC and the newly formed HE winning 3 pots, an ECAC crown, 2 bids to the national tournament with a final 4 and even a HE championship (regular season) but Ferns career also spanned a time when the administration could have cared less about winning or losing, they had a former Bruin and future NHL Hall of Farmer behind the bench and they felt they were lucky to have him .
When he retired the current Administration again did the PC thing and gave the job to long time assistant and former Bruin, Don McKenny, who was Fern’s best bud, teammate and long term assistant and in my view past his expiration date to take over the program, to his credit, he was nearly 60 when he took the job and we labored through 2 pretty poor seasons in terms of results before he retired in 1991-92. BTW, our boy JM was an assistant on those teams.
Then we got Ben Smith, a rich kid, whose father was a US Senator, prep schools, Harvard and all that crap, even though he had been 1-24-1 at Dartmouth the year before we hired him. Ironically, his only win came against NU. Do you think we did a national search to get him? Fired by the Big Green, he was, to that point in time, the shortest tenure in ECAC coaching history in any sport, for a position that wasn’t considered an interim coach. Today I cant imagine getting a job off of that kind of record as a HC.
I never wanted him at all, he was a Harvard/Yale guy who had been coaching with enemy Parker over at BU, when NU was still covered in blacktop, half the students lived at home and arrived on the Green Line each weekday morning. He had one good season at the helm and we reached the tournament but he also never won 20 games.
I am told that Smith knew more about hockey in terms of the game as it presents itself on a chalk board (X's O's) than any coach we have had, and to that extent lots of people took notice and recognized it and he eventually wound up coaching the US national team. Later, he established himself as great woman’s coach, as the top man for 3 Olympic squads.
The we got Crowder, another former Bruin, UNH guy and in my view, the worst of the lot, he never finished higher than 4th and also never won more than 13 games in nearly a decade as HC. After some flash in the pan success at UML that saw the Riverhawks have their first 20 win season at the Division 1 level, (FYI they were a DIV 2 powerhouse along with Merrimack for most of the 20th century) and an NCAA tournament bid in 1993, he had 2 more subsequent seasons that boasted a .640 winning %. during his tenure.
However, it's too bad that success didn’t translate to NU as his winning % was the worst since H. Nelson Raymond got permission form Honey Fitz to skate the team on the Duck Pond in the Public Garden. Bruce would be the 1st to tell you that he arrived at NU at the wrong time when the administration was trying to make major strides academically and thus he didn’t have the support of the administration in the way that he had at Lowell. Excuses, excuses! Don't get me wrong , it wasn't all bad as he did bring my pal Bruie Racine back to Boston for a year and we got **** faced like it was 1987 a few times, for that I am grateful.
That leads us to Cronin, who I believe was the best coach we have had to date historically, a local kid whose father and uncles played for the Huskies in the 60’s under Jim Bell. He was a Colby guy and a dam good hockey player in his own right with lots of DIV 1 offers, but he opted for the education and valuable NESCAC connections which in New England go further than even a BC degree if you ask me.
He took a bad team and made it good fairly quickly but likely had NHL coaching aspirations on day one of his arrival on Huntington Ave., to his credit he recruited top players like we had not seen before. He may have done it with a few early phone calls, you know the way UNH has been doing it since tricky Dick arrived in Durham in 1990.
There is no question he and Roby didn’t see eye to eye and after his recruiting violation (hick up) you could see Brian Burke in the stands on several occasions to know and confirm that it would only be a matter of time before he would be gone.
I will say this the players who played for Cronin loved the guy and that can be said of rafter rats right thru the full scholarship starters. However, again even in Cronin’s selection I don’t think there was ever a national search. This is unheard off in a college division that competes at this level. A division that is the equivalent of the SEC in Football. In late April 2011 the Toronto job became his and all of a sudden its mid July and we still don't have a hockey coach. The entire college hockey community is flabbergasted when Madigan is named.
Here is why, JM on paper is the least qualified candidate since Herb Gallagher head coach 1939 to 1956, who was a prep school hockey standout locally in Newton and went on to Caption the team, he even made the team without even trying out. I will add he was also the greatest AD in school history with all sports teams attaining nearly a .640 winning percentage in his 22 plus years at the helm of the Athletic Dept. but his teams were horrific when he was the coach, it was a time when it wasn't important who coached or what resume they had.
In Madigan, they again made no national search. He was cherry picked and although a scout and the only husky since Gallagher to coach the team since 1955, it was not the best decision in hinde sight.
It must have seemed like a great idea at the time as Jim is a well liked guy and has done many jobs for the university successfully, but he had been away form the game for nearly 2 decades. It had been 19 years since he had last been an assistant hockey coach in the early 1990’s and since that time he had worked in both Facilities Management and the Office of Business Development, with a short stint in athletic department sandwiched in between.
Those roles do not seem suited to be a Men's hockey coach at the DIV 1 level.
Jim was a good player too, perhaps an 80+ point player, he was very level headed and smart with puck and one of Fern's favorites. I just think that in the 20 years he was essentially gone form the game, the game at the college level has changed in many ways.
I just would like to see a national search for a coach when and if JM retires or if his contract is not renewed, because as far as I can tell that has never happened.. not once in nearly 90 years.
