Is coaching culture a problem in the NHL with so many firings?

At the end of the 2024-25 NHL regular season, the league had the shortest coaching tenure among the four major men’s sports leagues in North America, with an average tenure of 2.38 years across the 32 teams. 

So far in 2025-26, only the Columbus Blue Jackets have made a coaching change, parting ways with Dean Evason in favor of veteran bench boss Rick Bowness, but several other teams could see bench adjustments soon. 

On the latest episode of Daily Faceoff LIVE, hosts Tyler Yaremchuk and Carter Hutton were joined by former NHL coach, general manager and current analyst, Don Granato, to discuss whether coaching culture is a problem in the NHL. 

Tyler Yaremchuk: When you look at the NHL right now and the turnover rate for head coaches, like the longest tenured head coaches in the league, if you look at the top five. There are only a few who’ve been on the job for three or more years. Do you think that’s a problem with the culture around coaching in hockey and the NHL right now? If you’re a coach, you must feel like every day you’re coaching for your life, or every month you’re coaching for your life… Do you think the lack of stability sometimes hurts a coach’s ability to establish a proper culture?

Don Granato: It definitely can. I don’t want to say it does. It’s a challenge way beyond coaching; it’s a challenge for organizations and management, because we’re in the we all are living in the social media age, where negative energy and it just it feeds like wildfire, and it’s in such an ultra-competitive industry, it becomes a challenge for all organizations to tune out the noise of it. 

You have to respect your fans because they have passion and love, but you’re the ones who know what’s going on behind the scenes. Reflecting on my time with the Buffalo Sabres, coaching, and longevity, when you go to the media, we’d always think…whatever you say can and will be held against you. I can tell you about my last year in Buffalo. The year prior, we were third in the league in goals scored, so we moved our team up to the third-highest level in the NHL, but we were 28th or 27th in goals against. I remember saying, ‘I cannot tell the media we’re going to be working on reducing goals against, because the moment I say it, especially at the start of training camp, this is our emphasis and we’re going to give up five goals in a night and then they’re shoving a microphone in front of Rasmus Dahlin in the locker room, when I’m not in there, asking, how that is going.’ 

In my final season, we went down to 11th in the NHL and goals against. In the second half of the year, we were again in the top five in goals, but we couldn’t say that publicly. So I think that’s the biggest challenge. These coaches go before the media 200 times a year. What can you say 200 times a year that’s going to make you look competent anymore, especially if you’re not in a playoff spot? So it’s really challenging. Media access for coaches is not changing, but I think that contributes to the challenges coaches face. 

This isn’t rocket science. We know what wins and loses, and you have to find unique ways to say it again. You disperse it through your staff, and different coaches show clips, but, as you mentioned, this is the challenge in the positions we have.

You can catch the full segment with Granato and the rest of the latest episode here…