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The Official 2026 Off-Season Thread: Revenge of the Nerds

zeke said:
meh. not at all. probably miffed that they required him to go through the same full set of interviews as the others.
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Yeah, I can believe he was under consideration, but I don't believe he was offered the job and turned it down.

I suspect he'd interviewed with both the Kings and the Leafs. While he was under consideration for both jobs, the Kings offered him their job. Laviolette tried to leverage that offer into getting the Leafs to skip the rest of their interviews and hire him right away. The Leafs declined to make a decision right away or skip the rest of their interviews, so Laviolette went ahead and took the Kings job.

And the other thing is---who really cares? Laviolette is the OBC retread of all retreads. The Kings will be the seventh NHL team he's been the head coach for. The Stanley Cup he won was 20 years ago, with Rod Brind'Amour as his captain. I don't see what's particularly interesting about him as a candidate and I would've been underwhelmed if he was the choice.
 
BG said:
I feel like Hiller's previous connection to Matthews/Nylander, recent success in LA, and availability should have made him a more obvious guess for us and the general hockey community.
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Personally, I wouldn't have ever imagined they would hire one of Mike Babcock's former Toronto assistants.
 
that's not it. at least, not for me.

it's that they picked 2 completely unremarkable beige candidates without a strong track record of success, after making a public big deal out of how thorough their process was.
 
Calling Chayka unremarkable and beige is weird considering he was the first analytics GM, hired after starting one of the first analytics companies, at 26 and proceeded to get blacklisted by the league.

How is that beige or unremarkable? Everything in that sentence is crazy and unusual.
 
Leafin' said:
Elliott was saying he thinks it’ll be DJ Smith as Hillers main guy
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DJ has history with Hiller. so that connection makes sense.
But i have been liking the 'out of left field' hires so far this off season.
If Pavelski was a 'finalist' for the HC job, then i would think Chayka would like him for the AC.
 
In retrospect Hiller was one of the more obvious candidates, so its kinda funny that no insider thought to put his name out there.

Experienced, good analytics as a head coach, experience with the Leafs and Matthews/Willy, one of the more open minded, progressive coaches out there, started his own data tracking company, has a relationship with chayka going back 10 years when Chayka wanted to hire him but he went to the Isles instead.
 
Kritter said:
Would love to see Pavelski land the AC job.

Are there any rumors about the AC job yet?
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Uncle Fester, Steve Sullivan & Mike van Ryn are all still currently employed as Leaf assistant coaches.

I believe the next step in the process is Hiller will be talking with those guys and deciding which of them, if any, he’ll be keeping. And then after that they’ll be hiring new assistant coaches, if necessary.
 
One of the reasons he fell out of favor with the flyers is that he really struggled in the playoffs so there were fears about his size and stuff. Looking at the numbers, yeah, he kind of sucked despite favorable zone starts. Which feels very Liljegren-ish.

I'll just go ahead and blame his partner, Nick Seeler tho. He was even worse.
 
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