Sorry !! learn to stop when you're behind
http://http://triblive.com/sports/dejankovacevic/dejancolumns/6101769-74/lemieux-burkle-coach
By Dejan Kovacevic
Published: Friday, May 16, 2014, 11:22 p.m.
Updated 12 hours ago
Let's dispense with this right up front: Dan Bylsma isn't coming back to coach the Penguins.
No chance.
Not happening.
Now of course, his name never came up in the team's clumsy, confounding news conference Friday, the one in which Ray Shero was fired and we then waited awkwardly for the other shoe that never dropped. There already was an element of weirdness that the announcement wasn't being made by owners Mario Lemieux and Ron Burkle but by CEO David Morehouse, Shero's hierarchical equal. And it reached another level when one wiseacre actually had to ask whether, in fact, Bylsma was being fired.
You're welcome.
The answer from Morehouse was no different than those from Lemieux and Burkle an hour later, when they and I met in the owners' voluminous office across the Consol Energy Center hall from the news conference they just dodged.
“Dan's still the coach,” Lemieux replied to my first question, and he kept a straight face.
But no, really, Dan isn't still the coach. And I'll tell you why: It's because when Lemieux and Burkle arrived at their decision to fire Shero, they did so not only because of lousy drafts and an old, overpaid, soft roster, but also because — and let's be clear on this — the coach was every bit on board.
When Burkle made public it was Lemieux who ordered the addition of Jacques Martin to the staff last summer “to bring another coach in and see if we could be more flexible, try to adapt between how we were playing in the regular season and in the playoffs,” he wasn't exactly endorsing the head coach.
When Lemieux repeatedly stated the Penguins were lacking “grit and character,” he once took the extra step to add, “even on special teams.” The power play, he meant. Shooting the puck. Crashing the net. That's on the coach.
When I asked how the Penguins could go all season without giving soon-to-be-ancient defense prospect Simon Despres a long look, Lemieux replied, “Yeah.” Burkle chimed in, “Agree with that 100 percent.”
When Burkle described being convinced last summer by Shero to keep Bylsma, he recalled: “If you look back at that today, in some ways, I wish we hadn't made that bet. If we're disappointed, it's that we lost a year to the change that we should have made already.”
Yeah, that coach isn't coming back.