Misconduct | What’s the most unusual coaching dismissal you remember?

CF Montreal took to the skies this week with what must be one of the biggest coaching dismissals in sports history. That was all it took to inspire us with this edition of Bad Conduct.

Richard Labbe

We can say that there were a lot of business done under the sign of the unusual when Pierre Gauthier was the general manager of the Canadian. A defender, Jaroslav Spacek, had to dry for long minutes in the GM’s office before finding out where he had been traded, because the somewhat paranoid GM was afraid that the information would end up in the media. Another player, Mike Cammalleri, was traded mid-game.

To add to the circus, there was also the dismissal of an assistant coach, Perry Pearn. Dismissing an assistant in the middle of the season is already quite rare and often unnecessary, but Pearn was fired on October 26, 2011, barely two hours before the start of a game at the Bell Centre! This decision without tail nor head did absolutely nothing, except perhaps to widen even more the gap between Gauthier and the rest of the team. The farce finally came to an end in March 2012, when Gauthier himself was fired.

Mathias Brunet

Fired a year earlier by the Canadiens, Claude Julien is having a dream season in his first year with the New Jersey Devils. There is still a week to go in the “regular” season and the Devils, led by the Elias, Parise, Gomez, Rafalski, Gionta and of course Martin Brodeur, sit at the top of their division, in sixth place overall, with a record of 47-24-8 and 102 points.

Claude Julien certainly did not expect to receive this brick on the head that morning, especially since the Devils had just defeated the Boston Bruins, for their fourth victory in five games. But boss Lou Lamoriello had just decided his club was not ready for the rigors of the playoffs. “We are not in the right state of mind physically and psychologically for the playoffs and I have a responsibility towards the owners, the fans and the players”, he justified to the journalists.

The Devils eliminated the Tampa Bay Lightning, one of the worst clubs to make the playoffs, but were sidelined in just five games in the next round by Ottawa…with Lamoriello behind the bench. The Devils did not advance to the first round for the next four years. And in 2011, the year the Devils were left out of the playoffs with a meager total of 81 points, Claude Julien won the Stanley Cup in his fourth season in Boston…

Simon Olivier Lorange

Is it that unusual? Probably not. Is it even historical? No more. But the dismissal of Stéphane Waite, the Canadiens’ goaltending coach for seven seasons, particularly surprised me. That Waite would be let go in March 2021 was not in itself unimaginable: his main protege, Carey Price, was having an ordinary season and management had just shown the door to head coach, Claude Julien, and his assistant, Kirk. Muller. The managing director at the time, Marc Bergevin, had seemed to argue publicly that Waite had nothing to worry about; however, as we know, things sometimes change quickly.

What especially left a strange impression was the way the GM went about it. At the start of the third period of a home game against the Ottawa Senators, Bergevin walked into the box from where Waite was watching the game. “Are you kidding me?! “, he had then launched to his boss. He was, however, perfectly serious. The discussion lasted only a few minutes, and the Sherbrooke resident went down to get his personal effects in his office.

The organization announced later that evening after post-game press briefings that Waite was no longer on the team and that Sean Burke was replacing him. Firing a hockey staff member is not uncommon news in the life of an NHL team. But doing it as if he stole the money from the petty cash is not so elegant.

Alexander Pratt

Former Alouettes president and co-owner George Allen was above all a legendary coach in the United States. He was also elected to the Hall of Fame. This does not mean that his career was a long calm river. On December 24, 1968, at 8 a.m., he received a call from Dan Reeves, owner of his team, the Los Angeles Rams. The Rams were 10-3-1 then.

“I said something like Merry Christmas to him,” he told the Sports Illustrated. [Reeves] replied: “You are fired. The two of us don’t get along together anymore.” Ten years later, Allen returned with those same Rams. The experience only lasted two games … in preseason.

Jean-Francois Tremblay

Impossible to miss the dismissal of Wilmer Cabrera by the club formerly known as Impact. Cabrera was fired on October 24, 2019, 16 days after being sent as sole manager to the media to review the season.

Assessment that he had made like a big boy from the top of his two months of experience at the helm of the club, after a replacement at short notice from Rémi Garde. The replacement of Mauro Biello by Garde had been a fabulous failure, and the hiring of Cabrera (a few days after his own dismissal by the Houston Dynamo) by Kevin Gilmore remains one of the greatest mysteries in the history of Montreal sport. .

A coach without stature, who did not transform anything within the team, and who was then inexplicably sent into the mouth of the wolf at the end of the season report. Then one day, like that, he was fired, by press release, without explanation, nothing. Not that it wasn’t a just dismissal, far from it, but this episode is a perfect example of dysfunctional management within the Impact at that time.