TAMPA, Fla. _ Patience is a dying virtue and it's as true in hockey as anywhere else.
The Lightning's Jon Cooper is now the longest-tenured head coach in the NHL at only five years. He inherited that status Tuesday when Chicago fired Joel Quenneville after 10 years at the Blackhawks' helm.
It wasn't long ago that 10-year tenures were common and five didn't seem that long, but it's all a cycle.
"It's kind of going back to the days when the NHL stood for Not Here Long," NBC analyst Pierre McGuire said. "Coaches were fired and hired really quickly back in those days. You can look back to the '80s."
The Blackhawks weren't even the first team to fire a coach this season. Los Angeles beat them by two days, firing John Stevens on Sunday.
Cooper, who declined to be interviewed for this story, said becoming the longest-tenured coach in the league wasn't a good thing when it came at the expense of someone else in the coaching fraternity.
No coaches were fired during the season last year, but that's uncommon. All that really indicates is more teams waited until the offseason. Six teams hired coaches in the offseason; that's 20 percent of the league. Adding in the two coaches hired this week and one quarter of the league has a different coach than it ended the season with.
Barry Trotz, who was in town this week with the Islanders, is one of those newly hired coaches. In his case, he stepped down. Trotz led Washington to its first Stanley Cup, then left the team when he and management couldn't agree on a contract.
A report from NBCSports said he had been looking for a five-year contract and the team didn't want to grant that given the short shelf life of coaches.
As for why teams are quick to fire coaches, Trotz cited parity in the league and impatience. With pressure to win coming from fans, management, ownership and even players, it can be harder to wait it out for the long-term gain.
"A lot of times, a little bit of inexperience gives you less patience and you react differently than someone who has maybe been around a long time and seen the ebbs and flows of a season," he said. "All those things are combining to make a lot of changes."
There are a lot of things that can go wrong, so why is it usually the coach who pays first?
"A lot of times, not always, internally, managers overrate their team to their ownership," McGuire said. "They have a vested interest in having a higher-rated roster. Then the owner asks if our team is so good, why aren't we winning. The manager says, 'My coach isn't getting things done.' The coach doesn't have the direct line to the owner."
The obvious exception to that being when it's true. If you have high-end assets and aren't winning, there aren't many other places to look. McGuire's example was Pittsburgh, where the combination of Evgeni Malkin and Sidney Crosby was about as high end as it gets.
The examples of quick turnarounds can read like a shortcut for teams looking for one.
Los Angeles hired Darryl Sutter in December 2011; the Kings were an eighth seed to make the playoffs and won the Cup that year. They did it again two years later.
Pittsburgh hired Mike Sullivan in December 2015 and went on to win the Cup in back-to-back seasons, 2016 and 2017.
By those standards, Nashville almost looks like a long-term project. The Predators hired Peter Laviolette in the 2014 offseason after failing to make the playoffs for two years. They made the playoffs the next year and made it to the Stanley Cup Finals in Laviolette's third year.
Looking closer to home, the Lightning had missed the playoffs four out of five seasons when they hired Cooper. Now, they have missed once in five years and have made it to the Eastern Conference Finals three times.
The Lightning is the only team to advance that far three times in the past five years in either conference (the Penguins did it three times from 2013-17, though).
Does that success come from the coaching stability? Some, but that's over-simplifying matters. More, both the success and the stability are factors of a well-run organization.
"Jeffrey Vinik is one of the best owners in professional sports, maybe the best," McGuire said. "He provides the assets for his organization to survive. He doesn't meddle. They had a succession plan (at general manager), which is really smart."
Additionally, McGuire added, the Lightning have a great scouting staff, which has brought in players like Ryan McDonagh and Andrei Vasilevskiy, even when the transactions seem surprising.
"If you're looking for how coaches last longer, the owner usually doesn't meddle, and owners usually are told the right answer about the roster," McGuire said.
So far, that's been working for the Lightning.
