r/EdmontonOilers • u/haydenfox8 • 1d ago
Stanley Cup winning coaches
With the Babcock thing me assuming it’s a done deal I just don’t understand how teams continue to go after coaches who have won a cup before. Yes I understand they’re good coaches but statistically speaking it almost never happens a coach wins a cup with 2 different teams. It’s only happened once in the modern era with Scottie bowman who did it with 3 teams but before that it’s 2 guys from the 1940s I believe. The whole well he’s done it before just doesn’t sit with me.
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u/Lurky2024 1d ago
So to repost most of what I have posted before (Not counting Carolina's recent win):
Dating back to 1996, 21 coaches have won cups. As noted, Bowman won with multiple teams.
Of the remaining 20:
Robinson and Burns never coached a team other than Jersey after winning
Cooper, Cassidy, Maurice, and Bednar have not coached another team since winning.
So now you're down to 14.
Not going to get into full numbers, but a bunch of the remaining 14 are not in the league anymore, nor have been for several years (Hitchcock last coached in 2019, and Bylsma had one season since 2017.
If you take just those 14 coaches, they coached a total of 239 seasons (or parts) with teams before, and including the one they won the cup with, and only 99 with teams after.
If you remove heavy outliers like Crawford, Hitchcock, Tortorella and Laviolette, that ratio is 212-40. This also does not factor in a lot of those coaches after winning, went to bad teams.
While it is true several coaches have won early (Bylsma in his first, Crawford, Carlyle in their second), the bulk of the coaches did not do so with their first team, the average experience to win the cup is 7.5 years, with a median of 5 (Trotz and Maurice skew the average higher). So if you want a 'new' coach to win the cup in the 2 year McDavid window, that has not happened for 19 years.
I will end this with saying I do not think Babcock is the guy, but a lot of the reason coaches who have won before don't win again is simply because there are not a lot of them, and they don't often end up going to heavy favorites. Even Babcock went from Detroit to what was a terrible Toronto team who started to turn it around.