Joel Quenneville was fired earlier Tuesday morning and with his exit, the honour of longest tenured coach has been passed on to another man behind the bench.
There is a lot of turnover for head coaches in the NHL and we really didn’t realize how much until Quenneville was removed from his post. More than half of NHL coaches have started their current jobs in the last two years and the new longest tenured started in 2013. That’s right, with just five years in his current position, Jon Cooper is the new longestest tenured coach in the NHL.
That there is the top 10. Even seeing Todd McLellan and Mike Babcock as the 5th and 6th longest seems so weird considering how recent it seems that they shifted the NHL landscape with their moves.
If you want to compare it to other leagues, that just makes it feel even more extreme. In the NBA, the longest tenured is Gregg Popovich who has been with the Spurs for 22 years. In the NFL, it’s Bill Belichick at 18 years. In the MLB, Bruce Bochy has been with the Giants for 12 years.
Hopefully that gives you a fun fact to drop at the office and if not, then maybe you know everything about hockey and should probably start appearing in the BarDown quizzes.
