Like the crumbling of the Berlin Wall and the democratization of Eastern Europe, the firing of Terry Crisp as coach of the Calgary Flames was a sign of the changing times.
Dictators are no longer in fashion, either in the National Hockey League or in the real world, and Crisp's coaching style, unfortunately, bordered on dictatorship.In announcing Crisp's firing Monday, general manager Cliff Fletcher said in Calgary: "It is the feeling of our organization that to maximize the potential of our hockey club ... it necessitates a change of coach."
A minor surprise was that a replacement wasn't announced.
"I have a person in mind," said Fletcher, who has fired only two other coaches in his 18 years as Flames general manager. "I'm not going to speculate or play 20 questions on who may or may not be a candidate."
Away from the immediate trappings of the game, Crisp is a pleasant man. He is effervescent, friendly and accessible. But when called upon to exercise his responsibilities as a coach, he followed the tenets that he had been exposed to as a player, and that he himself had used with great success in junior hockey. The NHL is not junior hockey.
Today, many players come from Europe, where the approach to the game is often less intense. Many come from U.S. colleges and are academically oriented. Even Canadian juniors are much better educated than their predecessors, with the majority graduating from high school.
Coaches like Crisp, whose response to adversity is to scream at the players, are losing their popularity throughout the sport, but in Calgary, where Johnson's influence was still strong, Crisp immediately faced a solid barrier of resistance. The first time he stood on the dasher to scream at a referee, the players were horrified.
Crisp's choice of vocabulary was something less than exemplary as well.