from Kevin Paul Dupont of the Boston Globe,
The Avalanche last week broke the syndrome of hiring recycled NHL coaches, opting to fill their late-summer bench vacancy with Jared Bednar. If you’ve been too buried in beach reading to pay attention, the job opened unexpectedly when Patrick Roy abruptly resigned Aug. 11, convinced that his view from the bench was not in focus with the rest of Denver’s front office cognoscenti.
Unlike Roy, the sometimes tempestuous Hall of Fame goalie who backstopped Cups in both Montreal and Denver, the 44-year-old Bednar lacks any “Q factor.” Even in Cleveland, where he led the AHL franchise this spring to the Calder Cup championship, he was a virtual unknown. A defenseman, he was undrafted after three years of junior (Western Hockey League), then kicked around the minors for eight seasons before breaking into coaching as an assistant with the ECHL’s South Carolina Stingrays in 2002-03.
Some 14 seasons later, including three with the Springfield Falcons, voila, Bednar hit the big time Thursday when Joe Sakic and friends picked him to lead them out of their protracted tailspin. The Avs missed the playoffs for a second season in a row in 2015-16 and have DNQ’s five of the last six seasons. Roy’s bench had gone flat, despite some young, high-end talent up front (Nathan MacKinnon, Matt Duchene, Gabriel Landeskog).
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