The Detroit Red Wings officially got their training camp for the 2015/2016 season underway on Friday, September 18th in Traverse City. Despite bringing in free agents Mike Green and Brad Richards over the summer, the biggest change for the team was losing head coach Mike Babcock and replacing him with Jeff Blashill.
Babcock was the head coach of the Red Wings for a ten years, an eternity in the NHL, and enjoyed a lot of success. He never missed the playoffs, won a Stanley Cup, and got to a game 7 in a second Stanley Cup Final. Before coaching the Red Wings he took an undermanned Mighty Ducks of Anaheim team to the Stanley Cup Final and while coaching the Wings he won two gold medals coaching Team Canada at the Olympics (which doesn't seem like an accomplishment until you realize the drought Team Canada had in that tournament before). In the past couple of years especially he was able to turn a less than stellar defensive group in to one of the top shot suppressing teams in the league. Mike Babcock is regarded as one of the best coaches in the league, and very well should be.
All of that being said, I was ecstatic to see him leave and to see the Wings name Jeff Blashill head coach.
I've had the luxury of being able to watch a lot of games that Jeff Blashill has coached, either live or through a stream. Blashill is in many ways a disciple of Mike Babcock, in fact it was Babcock who called him out of the blue when Blashill was coaching Western Michigan University and asked Blashill to join Detroit as an assistant coach. The next year, he was offered the head coaching job in Grand Rapids and took it, wanting to stay until he found out whether Babcock would be staying or leaving.
So, it comes as no surprise that people have pointed out many of the similarities between Babcock and Blashill. It helps that they sound very much alike and use a lot of the same hockey lingo.
But I'm more interested in what separates the two coaches, apart from the well-known fact that Blashill is a player's coach who believes in open communication while Babcock was more old-fashioned in his relationships toward the players.
Due to this, I spent a serious chunk of time gathering the shots for and shots against data for the 2014/2015 Grand Rapids Griffins. Finding stats in the AHL is hard, so the best way I found to gather the data was to pull it from the individual game logs. My next post will detail that.
No comments:
Post a Comment