Tag: Joel Quenneville

The NHL shamelessly reinstated disgraced ex-Blackhawks leaders right at the start of free agency

Reinstating Joel Quenneville and Stan Bowman is disgusting enough, and the NHL made it worse.

After being banned for more than two years for their roles in the Chicago Blackhawks’ sexual assault scandal with former player Kyle Beach, the NHL made the puzzling decision to reinstate ex-Chicago general manager Stan Bowman and ex-head coach Joel Quenneville to full league service on Monday afternoon.

Both are eligible to work again starting on July 10 after the NHL published a milquetoast press release citing how they’ve “demonstrated sincere remorse.”

Letting Bowman and Quenneville work in hockey in any capacity again is disgusting enough. Given their respective roles in poorly addressing a sexual assault on their own team — to say the least — they are two people who should probably never step foot near any ice rink again.

The kicker is that the NHL dropped the official announcement of Bowman and Quenneville’s reinstatement on a late Monday afternoon of an exciting start to the 2024 free agency period. Why, it’s almost as if the league wanted as little attention as possible on letting two alleged monsters work in pro hockey once more:

Every time you think the NHL has turned a corner, it goes and willingly steps on a rake like this. It is not a stretch to imagine that the league knew people would rightfully frown upon Bowman and Quenneville’s reinstatement. Because in no way, shape, or form is a two-year ban sufficient for what these two men were reportedly responsible for. Most would likely agree that their NHL bans should have been permanent.

So, rather than have a zero-tolerance policy regarding even any partial enabling of sexual assault, the NHL seemingly tried to drop the news of Bowman and Quenneville’s reinstatement right as they thought everyone who follows their animated husk of a league would be drooling over player acquisition news.

It’s transparent and it’s awful. NHL leaders who green-lighted both the reinstatements and the timing of the Bowman and Quenneville news should be ashamed.

NHL fans ripped the league’s decision and timing of Stan Bowman and Joel Quenneville’s reinstatement

Tracking every available major NHL head coach during the 2022 offseason

The NHL coaching market is a deep one this year.

The NHL head coaching market is going to be a wild one for the 2022 offseason.

While the Stanley Cup playoffs are still ongoing, one of the biggest stories in hockey at the moment is the gargantuan list of head coaches on the market and the team vacancies available. Normally, there are a handful of teams and only a few major names available for coaching positions, but the 2022 offseason will have some surprisingly good coaches looking for jobs.

With Tuesday’s report from NHL Network’s Kevin Weekes that Bruce Cassidy is headed to the Golden Knights, there are now five teams in the market for a head coach. Those teams include:

  1. Philadelphia Flyers
  2. Boston Bruins
  3. Dallas Stars
  4. Winnipeg Jets
  5. Detroit Red Wings

It’s quite likely that list will grow in the weeks to come too. Honestly, the NHL’s head coaching carousel is probably going to be an even bigger watch than the upcoming free agent class, which is saying something.

Here are 11 major NHL head coach candidates to look out for during the 2022 offseason.

The hockey men continue to have no idea how to own their part in ruining Kyle Beach’s life

Failing to hold Kevin Cheveldayoff accountable is a travesty.

The NHL continues to flub the handling of its sexual abuse scandal in new and astonishing ways.

It’s tragic that I have to point out, up there in the first paragraph, that this isn’t some sort of anomaly; powerful people in sports have made a habit of covering up this sort of abuse. This isn’t some outlier. It’s just the NHL’s turn.

Yet the supposed leaders in various leagues and conferences repeatedly show they have learned nothing, at all, about how to handle the fallout — which guarantees they are not ready to make necessary changes to prevent these things in the future.

If you aren’t yet well-versed in the story of former Blackhawks player Kyle Beach — who was sexually assaulted by a staff member in 2010, reported it and was ignored — read Mary Clarke’s timeline of the situation.

While two of the leaders from that Blackhawks era have been forced to resign (Stan Bowman as GM in Chicago, Joel Quenneville as the head coach in Florida, where he’d been since 2019), the NHL announced Friday that it would not discipline Kevin Cheveldayoff, now the general manager in Winnipeg.

That makes no sense. You can, and most certainly should, hold someone responsible for not informing proper authorities about allegations of sexual assault. Which is what happened with Cheveldayoff. Per USA TODAY:

According to the findings released from a team-commissioned independent investigation by Jenner & Block on Tuesday, Cheveldayoff, then Chicago’s assistant GM, was part of a meeting with team leaders who did not act when a player, “John Doe,” alleged former video coach Brad Aldrich sexually assaulted him in 2010. The May 23 meeting also included former GM Stan Bowman, ex-coach Joel Quenneville and team president John McDonough, who would not report the alleged incident to human resources until June 14, days after the Blackhawks won the Stanley Cup. Human resources allowed Aldrich to resign June 16 instead of face an investigation.

What an awful message NHL commissioner Gary Bettman is sending. This only reinforces the idea that matters like this should be left to “senior” managers, when we have seen, time after time, that those are precisely the people most likely to cover it up.

And, also, the NHL should simply … expect all of its people in positions of power to do the right thing. This is not that hard.

Of course, Cheveldayoff tripped all over himself in a statement:

The words “I’m sorry” do not appear here. The words, “I was wrong” do not appear here. The words “I made a mistake and will regret it forever” do not appear here.

What’s here, though, is an attempt to deflect from his own role in causing Kyle Beach’s pain by calling Beach “incredibly brave.”

That reaction is more than a decade too late, Kev. Why weren’t you courageous enough to believe him then, and have you done anything, at all, to change the way you see things now?

Nobody has handled this well. My colleague Charles Curtis pointed out how ludicrous Blackhawks captain Jonathan Toews sounded when he expressed sorrow for Bowman rather than focusing on Beach and a broader hockey culture that failed him. And Andy Nesbitt showed how mumbly and spineless Gary Bettman has been.

Quenneville at least said he wants to learn and improve, but only after distancing himself from Beach by referring to him as “this young man.”

Beach is 31 now. In 2010 he was a rising prospect. He’d been the 11th overall pick in the 2008 draft and had just scored 86 points playing a rugged style (186 penalty minutes) in his final season of junior hockey. Quenneville may not have known him well, but Beach most certainly was not just some “young man.”

Much of the blame for how the Blackhawks failed here has amorphously been assigned to “hockey culture.” It’s important for those within the sport, though, to explore what actually happened. Blanket condemnations may ring true, but they provide little path toward reconciliation.

There were specific problems here that need to be explored. Toews had been named captain, a position with real power in the NHL, before he could legally drink alcohol. Perhaps it’s not the best idea to have someone so young serve as the representative of the players to the coaching staff.

A more mature player might have set a different tone in the locker room, too:

Is this the reason people in Chicago didn’t take Beach seriously? Did they fail to believe a 6-foot-3, 200-pound power forward could be sexually assaulted by a video coach? Was there no understanding of power dynamics? Or just a callous disregard for any issue that didn’t directly effect the chase for a Stanley Cup?

Bruins winger Taylor Hall was one of several players who delivered a better message in the wake of this story shaking the NHL:

That gives you hope, right? That a player can see it this way. But how do we not also despair, knowing that one of the old boys just skated away, clear and free? He’s still there making decisions that impact the lives of every person in an entire organization, and when it comes time for him to fess up, to say he’s sorry, to admit to what he did wrong and say how he’s going to change, he instead just offers up “empathy” to the man whose life he helped ruin.

How are we supposed to deal with that?

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Former Notre Dame Players in NHL to Begin 2020-21 Season

The NHL finally drops the puck on its 2020-21 season Wednesday. With COVID-19 still running rampant, this will be a season unlike any other.

The NHL finally drops the puck on its 2020-21 season Wednesday. With COVID-19 still running rampant, this will be a season unlike any other. Teams will play 56 games in divisions that drastically have been realigned for the season, and teams will not play outside their respective divisions. But no matter which team you root for, there will be plenty of players who suited up for Notre Dame before they ascended to hockey’s highest level.