CHICAGO — The Chicago Blackhawks have fired Jeremy Colliton 12 games into his fourth season as the team’s coach — and three years to the date of his hiring.
The Hawks are off to one of the worst starts in franchise history, going 1-9-2. They set an NHL record for time without holding a lead to start a season: 360 minutes, 57 seconds.
Derek King, who had been coaching the Rockford IceHogs, was named interim head coach effective immediately. Assistant coaches Tomas Mitell and Sheldon Brookbank also were fired, while assistants Marc Crawford, Jimmy Waite, Matt Meacham and Dylan Crawford will remain on the coaching staff in their current positions.
“It has been an extremely difficult couple of weeks for our organization, and we have had to come to terms with a number of necessary changes,” CEO Danny Wirtz said in a statement Saturday. “On the ice, interim general manager Kyle Davidson has our full confidence and autonomy to make hockey decisions, and we support him on this coaching change.
“We appreciate all that Jeremy has brought to the Blackhawks, and we look forward to working with Derek as our interim head coach while we work to rebuild our permanent hockey operations leadership.”
It wasn’t at all the start the Hawks expected after they made offseason transactions to upgrade their goaltending and defense and hoped some of their young forwards would step up.
They lost 4-2 to the Colorado Avalanche in the opener and, except for a good period here and there, never recovered.
Asked after a 4-1 home loss to the Vancouver Canucks on Oct. 21 if he felt mounting pressure, Colliton said: “It’s always there. … There was pressure from the first day I got here.”
Colliton finished with an 87-92-26 record.
His dismissal is reminiscent of Joel Quenneville’s firing on Nov. 6, 2018. The Hawks got off to a 6-2-2 start under Quenneville but fell to 6-6-3 after a five-game winless streak.
“Sometimes, as painful as it is, you need a fresh start,” then-team President John McDonough said of signing off on Quenneville’s firing after he led the Hawks to three Stanley Cups.
They replaced him with Colliton, who became the 38th coach in franchise history and, at 33, the league’s youngest coach. Now 36, he remained the league’s youngest coach before his firing.
“Ultimately, it’s about winning,” Colliton said at the time of his hiring. “I have to earn their trust by them believing that I can help them win, that I can help them be better individually, that we as a staff can put together a plan so they can have success.”
Colliton started with two regulation losses and one overtime loss in his first three games and finished the 2018-19 season with a 30-28-9 record.
The Hawks went 32-30-8 in the pandemic-halted 2019-20 season. When the season restarted, the Hawks made the league’s expanded postseason field and beat the Edmonton Oilers 3-1 in the play-in round, but they lost their first-round series against the Vegas Golden Knights 4-1.
Last season’s youthful squad finished 24-25-7 in a 56-game schedule restricted to division opponents because of COVID-19 precautions.
Colliton said he gained confidence and a deeper knowledge of his team through years of experience and building relationships with his players as they developed.
“The longer you go, the more situations you’ve been through,” he said a day before the 2021-22 season opener. “It’s hard to coach a player if you haven’t built a relationship with them yet. And when you first come into a new team, it’s difficult. It takes time to do that. And when you don’t have success, it doesn’t make it easier.
“I know this group. Whether it’s guys who’ve been here a while and I’ve coached them for however many years or young players and maybe I had them in Rockford or had them as young players here, they know me, I know them and it just makes it easier.”
But it became apparent that Colliton was unsure exactly what he had.
Through training camp, he mixed up defensive partners after prized acquisitions Seth Jones and Jake McCabe struggled to form chemistry.
He began shuffling forward lines, abandoning mixes almost as soon as he formed them.
For example, Tyler Johnson started off on a first line with Patrick Kane and Alex DeBrincat, and by the fourth game Kane was playing with Kirby Dach and Brandon Hagel while DeBrincat and Johnson were dropped to the third and fourth lines, respectively.
“I thought we gave some of those lines a pretty good run in camp and thought maybe we had something,” Colliton said Oct. 23, “but when the season started we didn’t continue that momentum. When you’re searching for a spark, the lines are one way to do it.”
Former Lightning, Rangers, Canucks and Blue Jackets coach John Tortorella (.548 winning percentage in 20 seasons) is a potential candidate to replace Colliton. He and the Blue Jackets agreed to part ways after last season, and ESPN hired him as a studio analyst in August.
New York Islanders assistant Lane Lambert has been viewed as a future head coach for some time.
