The Calgary Flames made their first off-season move on Tuesday afternoon, firing head coach Glen Gulutzan.
General manager Brad Treliving also relieved assistant coaches Dave Cameron and Paul Jerrard of their duties.
The news comes just over a week after the team’s annual internal exit meetings and final media availabilities for the 2017-18 National Hockey League season, what is being evaluated as an underachieving year for the club.
After guiding the Flames to the 2016 playoffs in his first season as bench boss (which ultimately resulted in a four-game sweep at the hands of the Anaheim Ducks), Gulutzan followed it up with a 37-35-10 campaign. The team was officially eliminated from Stanley Cup playoff contention on March 26 with a 3-0 loss at the Los Angeles Kings.
The team’s troubles didn’t start in the final month of the campaign, although the last few weeks of the season went off the rails. The Flames won only two games in their final 11. It was hard to believe it was the same club that was in a playoff position on Feb. 25, when they occupied the final Wild Card spot in the Western Conference.
They finished 20th overall while their home record, 17-20-4, was the 28th-worst in the NHL. Their powerplay was 29th in the NHL at 16 per cent.
The team lacked resilience when things were difficult. They ran into injury trouble. They struggled with secondary scoring.
And while many of those factors are not the direct result of Gulutzan and his coaching, dominoes have to fall after a deplorable season like this one.
“Everybody is going to dissect what they want to dissect but when you’re in it, if I look at the two years that I’ve been here … Last year’s team was the epitome of we did a good job of putting a team together,” Gulutzan said last Monday. “I thought this year, honestly, we had better players. We just never had as consistent a team effort, but we didn’t have as consistent of a lineup. We didn’t, as coaches, bring these guys together enough.
“It’s not always the teams with the best players that win, it’s the team with the best team. We all know that … I look back at that and I think, ‘What more could we have done to build tighter bonds within that group, to withstand the times when it got tough? Because it’s seems when it got tough, we weren’t there.”
The 46-year-old native of Hudson Bay, Sask., was hired by Treliving on June 17, 2016, following the dismissal of Bob Hartley. Gulutzan has a 146-125-23 record at the NHL level between two season with Calgary (2016-2018) and two seasons at the helm of the Dallas Stars (2011-2013).
He had one year remaining on his contract.
“We’ve got a good coach,” Treliving said last Monday. “At this time, we have to evaluate everything. And that’s not emotional. I’m certainly not a believer that you just spit people out time and time again.
“It starts with me. We have to evaluate the manager first. I believe in accountability, and when you’re at the front of the line, you have to be accountable first, and then we’ll start looking everywhere else. But certainly, we are going to evaluate everything, we are going to evaluate everybody. Without prejudice. Without blame. But with one singular goal — how do we get better? And how do we correct what we felt went wrong?”