FanHouse Marc Crawford

The success of coaches in professional sports is difficult to predict. Bill Belichick was an abject failure in Cleveland, but is now considered one of the top coaches in all of sports. Flip Saunders did pretty well for himself in Minnesota, but could not bring a championship to Detroit. In the NHL, Claude Julien and Paul Maurice are two examples of coaches who got the proverbial walking papers and found great success at later jobs.

Since coaches are essentially hired to be fired, veteran NHL coach Marc Crawford has been fired. He's actually about to begin his fourth stop in the league, as the Dallas Stars hired him Thursday to replace the fired Dave Tippett.

As if often the case, one or two assistant coaches have to take the fall when a head coach is fired. In this instance, the LA Kings fired both Mike Johnston and Dave Lewis (pictured), letting new coach Terry Murray pick new assistants that will do his bidding and fetch his slippers.

Make no mistake, Johnston and Lewis are two of the brightest coaching minds in the business, and won't be out of work long. This firing wasn't about them or their coaching abilities, it was simply because Marc Crawford was a lousy coach.

Yes, Crawford led the Kings down the road of despair, and his two assistants paid the price because of it. Crawford made the Kings look so bad that Lewis and Johnston looked bad just by association.

I do kinda feel sorry for Dave Lewis, given that it has been a tough few years for him. After a brief stint as the Wings' head coach, Lewis was the head coach in Boston for ONE season before getting canned. Then, he goes to the Kings and gets canned after ONE season. At least he's got to be good at packing dishes and books into boxes.

As for the replacements, the Kings' went out and got Mark Hardy, a long time Kings player, and Nelson Emerson, whose coaching experience is rather limited. Certainly, this can't be seen as anything but a downgrade.

Every day from Monday to Saturday, The Ice Sheet will take a look at the biggest stories in the league that happened on the ice and elsewhere the night before.

Let's face facts, folks. The NHL All-Star game is a giant bore, and the skills competition no longer holds as much interest as it used to as the novelty has worn off.

Well, some great news for fans as it appears the NHL is taking a page from the NBA's Slam Dunk competition. The hook? A shootout competition which will showcase the NHL's best and brightest showing off their slickest moves while schooling the likes of Martin Brodeur.

The shootout will feature three players from each conference. They will be allowed to start from anywhere on the ice, even behind the net they are shooting on. The competitors will get two chances each. The judges will score the move anywhere from a 1 to a 9. If the player scores, he'll get an additional point, allowing for the possibility of a perfect 10. All six All-Star goalies will take a turn in net.

The two players with the highest scores from each conference will showdown in the final. Once again, they will get two attempts each. The single best score (ie: one 10 beats two 9's) is declared the shootout champion.

This, along with other tweaks, will give the NHL's skills competition a much needed shot in the arm. The Sports Network (TSN) has been campaigning for this sort of competition all season, and, amazingly, the NHL listened.

I can't wait to see some moves that can top Marek Malik's between the legs roofer, Robbie Schremp's lacrosse moves, or Jussi Jokinen's 'drag and drop'.

Whatever Rob Blake said to referee Dan O'Halloran last night, the Los Angeles Times couldn't print it. (Maybe he was arguing in favor of conservative political ideology.) Whatever the Kings captain uttered, it was good enough to earn him 22 penalty minutes and a game misconduct, with Phoenix's Radim Vrbata scoring on an ensuing power play to break a 1-1 tie and help lead the Coyotes to a 4-2 win in Los Angeles. The Canadian Press considered the ejection of Blake to be a "huge break" for Phoenix, which means that the Canadian Press must believe it's still 2002.

So what set Blake off? Kings Coach Marc Crawford acknowledged that Blake had earned an earlier roughing penalty, but brazenly criticized O'Halloran's harsh rebuke of Blake's yapping; arguing that Blake was simply reacting to the Coyotes crashing goalie J.S. Aubin's crease about a week after the Kings lost starter Jason LaBarbera to injury after the Avalanche crashed him. "The referee should know what the climate of the team is," he told the Times after the game. Not only that, but Crawford said O'Halloran was out of line for daring to slap the hand of a "hall of famer," a "classy guy" and a "character guy" like Blake. "He didn't get the benefit of the doubt tonight. Usually those guys do," said the Kings coach, as relayed by Matthew Kredell of the L.A. Daily News.

Whatever valor Crawford was lauding, it was lost on many of the fans on the Let's Go Kings boards. I agree with him that it's a captain's duty -- depending on that captain's predisposition for physical play -- to make sure the opponent isn't taking liberties with any of his teammates. But Crawford is defending the indefensible when it comes to Blake's ejection; all that did was hand Phoenix a power play and limit the Kings to five D-men for 40 minutes as their captain was back in the players' lounge. But if we've learned anything about Marc Crawford this week, it's his warped sense of justice and retribution.

The news that coach Marc Crawford's locker room marching orders may have led to Todd Bertuzzi's infamous attack on Steve Moore is painful, damning, embarrassing ... really, pick any adjective with a negative connotation for what it means for hockey. Jim Kelley of SI.com calls it a "PR nightmare." Even FanHouse's MJD centered today's "Debriefing" on the story, and the only time hockey enters that level of his conversation is when he wants to pull down his jockeys and dump on it.

The story is so big that it inspired Steve Shannon to run to the phone and call in to "NHL Live" on XM Satellite Radio this afternoon about the controversy. Shannon is the former coach of the currently defunct Motor City Mechanics whom the United Hockey League suspended in 2005 for allegedly offering his players a $200 bounty to take out an opponent. (Shannon denies the bounty was ever offered, and claims two of his players have signed affidavits that back him up.) On the air with hosts Don La Greca and EJ Hradek, he defended Crawford, claiming that a coach simply saying Moore must "pay the price" wasn't enough to damn him in light of Bertuzzi's eventual actions. "There's plenty of activity that can take place that can get a guy's attention," he said. "There's no reason to go after a guy otherwise, outside the rules. To put blame on a coach, I just don't think that's necessary."

La Greca pressed him on the issue, asking if Crawford shouldn't receive some punishment for encouraging the hit. Shannon continued:

"It has to go back to what he actually said. To say that somebody should 'pay the price' and turn that around into 'something illegal should happen, outside the rules of the game?' I don't think the term 'pay the price' means 'hurt somebody outside the rules of the game.'"

It was an interesting, impromptu moment for a show that's been making its share of headlines lately. Later, Hradek ended the interview with some unsolicited advice for the unscheduled call-in guest: Next time, increase the bounty. "$200 isn't going to get it done, Steve," said Hradek. Tongue-in-cheek. I think.

Who's In: G J.S. Aubin (FA-TOR), LW Kyle Calder (FA-DET), C Michal Handzus (FA-CHI), D Jon Klemm (FA-DAL), LW Ladislav Nagy (FA-DAL), D Tom Preissing (FA-OTT) and D Brad Stuart (FA-CAL).

Who's Out: G Sean Burke (FA-Limbo), G Mathieu Garon (FA-EDM), RW Tom Kostopoulos (FA-MTL) and D Aaron Miller (FA-VAN).

What's Changed: What hasn't? As FanHouse's Jes Golbez pointed out back in July, Kings GM Dean Lombardi bypassed the big name free agents an opted for importing reasonably priced second tier veterans. The result: He filled the holes in the roster to supplement a promising core of young talent that includes Anze Kopitar, Mike Camalleri, Dustin Brown, Patrick O'Sullivan and Jack Johnson.

Better yet, most of the new imports are coming to town with something to prove. Calder was an enigma during a season where he quietly migrated from Philly to Detroit. Nagy made his way from Phoenix to Dallas and passed without a trace, while Stuart couldn't find his game in either Boston or Calgary. Are we sensing a theme here?

With the Kings boasting additional depth up front and on the blue line, the open question now falls in net, where five different goalies, including disastrous Japanese import Yutaka Fukufuji, gave up 283 goals last season. Second year head coach Marc Crawford admitted he made a hash of the situation, settling on a tandem of Dan Cloutier and Garon, a decision that sentenced Jason LaBarbera to a full season in the minors in order to keep him from being snatched off waivers. But another injury limited Cloutier to only 24 games, opening the revolving door to misery.

This year Cloutier and LaBarbera are back, along with free agent import Aubin. LaBarbera, who had a career year while he was trapped in the AHL and has a quick start in 2005-06 on his resume may be the best bet, but I have my doubts that anybody currently with the big club offers any sort of long-term solution. Here's hoping Rob Blake, Johnson, Stuart and the rest of the blue liners like blocking shots.