Where Would the NHL 'Old Guard' be Most Successful?
Power dynamic imbalances are where Force thrives
Tyrants like imbalances.
Tyrants like power dynamics when they work in their favor.
Tyrants get extinguished when the hierarchy and power structure is flat or inverted.
In the NHL, and other major sports… Power dynamics are shifting.
And that’s bad news for the Force Coach.
They need the players to be ‘weak’ or ‘desperate’ for their threats to work.
Force only has the illusion of working in a few situations:
Force only works when the leader is present. Power works when nobody knows where the leader is.
Force works in an imbalance of power dynamics
Power Dynamics
The transfer portal gives power to the college athlete. The fact NHL players make more money than the HC gives power to the players.
In this game, the coach is accountable to the user experience of the players. The incentives are actually more aligned for the players to have a ‘good’ coach. I know it’s still hard to believe right now with who is coaching at the top, but it’s coming…
Unhappy players can result in a coaching change in pro and can result in a mass exodus from your college program, which should send some signal flares to the AD to look into the current HC and why 10 players are leaving your 25-man roster…
So where’s the best place for guys like Mike Babcock, Lindy Ruff and other Force Coaches to finally start thriving? The FPHL. The SPHL.
At these levels of hockey, Force can rule because the players ‘need’ to ‘listen’ to the guy with authority because if they don’t, they might be bagging groceries at Kroger next weekend and out of a hockey career.
If this doesn’t get you thinking that a ‘false leadership environment’ gets created where coaches can have success and advance to the next level (because GMs at the next level just care if he has ‘won’) for having success in environments that don’t translate… Well, I just opened the door for you to start thinking…
GMs that hire, catch this…
They listen to the HC in the SPHL because they ‘have’ to not because they ‘want’ to.
Meaning, Force coaches can create the illusion of being a master coach when really it’s all an illusion.
This is why the Peter Principle is a thing:
The Peter principle is a concept in management developed by Laurence J. Peter which observes that people in a hierarchy tend to rise to "a level of respective incompetence": employees are promoted based on their success in previous jobs until they reach a level at which they are no longer competent, as skills in one job do not necessarily translate to another
Not only do skills in one job not translate to another but ‘success’ at one level of hockey does not translate to the next because power dynamics change at each step of the way…
This is why giving people a chance at the next level and only citing they are being hired because they’ve ‘won’ at a lower one… Is a bad reason to pull someone up higher.
Players listen to the coach in the SPHL because they have to… Players listen to the NHL coach because they ‘want’ to.
To make matters worse, most people who experience success at these lower levels aren’t going to get super introspective overnight and understand there’s a different power structure in place in the next place, they are just going to tell their players stories about winning at lower levels and repeating the same process regardless of the new environment.
And instead of quickly eliminating those who make Year 1 mistakes in Year 20, we let them stay in the NHL until they die.
Power Translates and Transfers
We all know a youth coach who still tells everyone to “pass the ball to the Italians.”
If you don’t get the ‘Kicking and Screaming’ reference, we still have 8u coaches telling players to pass it to Johnny who is the fastest skater and he’ll take it wide around everyone and score.
We know this doesn’t translate to the next levels of hockey.
My analogy is such…
Just as playing the ‘pass it to the best players’ way is detrimental to the players and doesn’t translate to the next level, neither does juicing a minor pro team to extract every single ounce of nectar by coaching with Force for the coach to ‘win’ so he can ‘advance’ and perpetuate Force coaching at the next level.
Force Coaching doesn’t translate to the next levels of leadership.
It is crashing and burning in real-time at the highest levels of sport.
Force is ‘level-limited’.
Power is unlimited.