Let’s start off by saying Mike Babcock and Bill Peters are scum as people. When you’re a head coach at any level, you’re job is to teach and nurture players to get better. While a little “tough love” may be needed, the psychological damage and utter disregard for players as humans is something that shouldn’t be tolerated under any guise.

As always, though, you’ll have people either try to defend them or say they didn’t see or hear anything like that when they were around them. I won’t call them enablers because there’s an off chance that they weren’t focused on anything aside from their goal.

That all said, though– let’s look deeper into the whole situation because there’s a lot of former players coming out and saying that players would go to the GM regularly to have said coach fired or their concerns were brought up to no change being made. This is where things get the murkiest for the higher ups for not doing their leg work on this. Carlo Colaiacovo said that some players from the Red Wings went to Ken Holland with concerns of Babcock only to be shuttered out. No word of if the Edmonton media has pressured Holland about this claim. Not only that, but then Carolina GM Ron Francis was made aware of the physical altercations between Peters and players. The result was a contract extension. Francis hasn’t made public comment yet, as he is currently at the helm of the Seattle franchise.

This is not to say that players should be in charge of who they want to coach, but if they’re coming to management with solid evidence of what’s going wrong and management doesn’t bat an eye to the situation– that’s just shitty management and shitty people in those management roles.

Both Babcock and Peters held significant roles with Hockey Canada, as well– Babcock coaching multiple Olympic teams, World Juniors, and World Championships, while Peters was a U18 Championships coach, a World Championship coach, and assistant for the World Cup of Hockey. Whether or not Hockey Canada will look into their dealing deeper, who knows if the short time those teams were together if anything happened or if because it’s a such a tight ship with people looking over the shoulder all the time, these guys actually had to act professional in that time span.

The era of recycling coaches will hopefully come in an end because of this, regardless of what “brilliance” may be provided. The recycling should have never happened either. There’s plenty of good coaches out there, but teams are too lazy to actually scout them or give them the chance in the “win now” mentality that is brought to them by ownership; so they go with the easy fix or a known commodity– due diligence be damned. With all of this coming to the surface– you can bet that the process of selecting a coach will be thorough as hell now, as it should have been already.

As far as these two are concerned, I could see Peters being without a job indefinitely…but it’s a harder sell for me on Babcock. Regardless of the mental trauma he put on players, Mike Keenan still got work well past his due date. That’s something that will always tell me to never say never when it comes to coaches being disgraced out of the business. Honestly, Babcock could land a job sooner rather than later because hockey is stupid and lazy like that.