Was it worth it, Joel?
Joel Quenneville, owner of 3 Stanley Cup rings and a 7-0 start with the Florida Panthers, resigned in disgrace on Thursday night. source: Getty Images A day late, and really 11 years late, Joe Quenneville resigned from his head coaching gig, though now it’s with the Florida Panthers. Quenneville was cowardly and disgustingly allowed to be behind the bench Wednesday night for the Cats, not even an hour after Kyle Beach had poured his heart out on TSN. It was yet another awful sight for the NHL, which only had to take the simple step of “suspending him pending a review.” So could have the Panthers. Why was one game in October worth that? This is the question we keep asking about all of this: Why was it worth it?
Quenneville is just the latest example of the evils and pitfalls of a coach seeing everything as binary. Either they help a team win, or they don’t. We’ve seen it in football with the coaches spending 18 hours a day in their offices. Or coaches simply not appreciating their players as anything more than tools, as we just saw in the NWSL. All Q knew was his job, and life really, was judged on wins and losses, and any threat to those wins was to be avoided, countered, squashed.
It doesn’t matter if Quenneville learns, as he’s likely out of a job for life now (we can only hope). What matters is that all coaches now, and especially ones in the future, know that part of their job is to see the wider picture, the real life implications. That their players are people, at all times, no matter how small they might feel. That they can destroy a life. Their job is more than on the field, and if they lose sight of it, they’ll lose those jobs.
It will hopefully be an example to anyone already behind a bench, or who will be, that Quenneville has lost his spot in the Hall of Fame, no one will mention his three championships first, if at all, and the first thing to pop up when looking up his name is his sad and false denials and cowardly ducking of the press last night, as well as his quotes and role in failing Kyle Beach. If human compassion isn’t enough for people to do the right thing, and we know that can be in short supply when the chips are down, perhaps that price paid will be.