Jacques

It was that kind of week in the NHL.

Mike Keenan in Philly; Jean Perron in Montreal; and now, Jacques Martin in St Louis.

Ron Caron looked at the assembled group and sighed heavily before clearing his throat and starting the small scrum.

“Basically we’re trying to get a little bit out of our extreme defensive approach,” he said.

It had been a frustrating season for the Blues, yet one full of potential. Tony McKegney would know his only 40-goal season; a young Doug Gilmour would break the 30-goal barrier along with other youngster Mark Hunter.

Only five players on that team were over 30 years old, but the rebellion against Jacques Martin would come from his youngsters.

“Whoever takes over from Jacques,” said Caron, “will have the mandate to let the players be themselves individually.”

The problems were aplenty: Blues ownership wanted playoff success, Jacques Martin had only won a single of three series; a 66-71-23 record during the regular season; the younger offensive core had frequently requested a more free-flowing system.

“Admittedly we saw young players develop but the team wasn’t competitive.”

The next few lines from Caron would come as a curiosity in modern twenty-first century hockey. The Blues GM went on explaining that he wanted his team to display a more offensive brand of hockey, a brand as far as possible from the New Jersey Devils’ bump-and-grind defensive style.

“We want to provide the fans with a more entertaining brand of hockey,” he said. “A more aggressively offensive team.”

Probed on a replacement, Caron was quick to dismiss rumors that Jean Perron would replace Martin.

The players would not come out to defend their coach due to Ron Caron’s tight control of the locker room. However, the first major critic of Martin’s firing came from the man he had replaced, Detroit Red Wings coach Jacques Demers.

“They didn’t give him the time he needed,” Demers said. “I’m not one to criticize Caron or (team president) Jack Quinn, but I just don’t get it, he’s going to be one of the best coaches in the NHL one day.”

Martin would thank the team and quietly leave with the class he’s been associated with throughout his career; the Blackhawks immediately called him to assist their new fiery coach Mike Keenan.

The Blues would hire the newly retired Brian Sutter who went on to a .488 record in his first year. He coached the team during four seasons, never making it past the second round of the playoffs.

Martin moved on to NHL stints with the Blackhawks and Nordiques before landing the head coaching position in Ottawa.

Demers would say of Martin in 2011, almost 40 years after his first coaching position in the NHL, 35 after he said Martin would be one of the best in the NHL:

“He’s still the guy you want around your young and veteran players,” he said. “He’s got the feel and discipline on his teams of an old school NHL coach and he knows how to balance work and reward, he’s seen it all and the guys know it, they know they’ll never be outcoached.”

“They also know he’ll never sell them out especially in Montreal where the media has a tendency to make everything front page news, they trust him.”

Although Jacques Martin’s decisions are now front-page news, his first appearance in the news was a small blurb in the Reading Eagle on page 48. It read that a coach from Guelph called Jacques Martin had been hired as the Blues’ head coach to replace Jacques Demers who had left for a 5-year, $1M contract with the Red Wings after a contractual dispute with the St. Louis front office.

Interesting Facts:

At that time, the average NHL salary for a coach was $130,000. The Blues soon sued Demers; they claimed he had broken a contract that was supposed to run until 1989.

Demers’s salary with the Blues was $75,000 annually before he left for Detroit.

Jacques Martin’s current salary is rumored to be about $1.5M annually in Montreal, one of the best-paid coaches in the NHL. For comparison’s sake, his salary with the Blues when he was hired was around $50,000 a year.