Baffoe: Is Joel Quenneville The Greatest Coach In Chicago Sports History?
By Tim Baffoe--
(CBS) The mustache and winning have become inexplicably linked in Chicago. Every championship won by a team in the four major sports in this city has happened with a hairy lip hovering over the bench.
Phil Jackson? Mustachioed. Ozzie Guillen? Stached. If you merely say "Ditka," your nose hair grows and you hear 76 of his commercials.
Even "Baffoe" means mustache in Italian. And hell if writing at 670TheScore.com for all the T-shirts and autographed Chris Rongey headshots I can handle ain't winning, right?
And then there's the stache du jour, Joel Quenneville, and his three Stanley Cup championships in seven-plus seasons coaching the Chicago Blackhawks.
To argue the greatness of Quenneville -- who was signed to a three-year contract extension Tuesday that will keep him at the United Center through 2020 -- as a coach is stupid at this point. That was established before this big week of his in which he also moved into a tie with Al Arbour for the second-most NHL coaching wins ever. He won't catch his boss, Blackhawks senior advisor of hockey operations Scotty Bowman, who has 1,244 coaching victories, and Quenneville said as much when interviewed immediately on the ice after defeating Nashville on Tuesday night.
But do we argue appropriately for Coach Q's status in the pantheon of modern Chicago sports coaching? Is he considered perhaps the best professional sports head coach this city has ever seen?
Guillen can claim the only World Series title in the lifetime of anyone reading this when his White Sox won the championship in 2005, but his lack of sustained success on the South Side had his eventual exit in 2011 backed by a majority of the fan base. That he failed in Miami afterward and hasn't managed since hinders his comparative résumé here.
Mike Ditka is a demigod who largely underachieved with superior talent and inhaled celebrity like his namesake cigars (and his encased meats and his pork chops and his wine and his endorsed injury attorney and his preferred car dealership and ... ). His placement in any coaching greatness discussion is more by default than merit.
Which leaves Jackson and his six Bulls championships -- the de facto greatest -- right?
Jackson was NBA Coach of the Year only once, which is criminal. His 1,155 wins are sixth all time in the NBA (he presumably will be passed by Gregg Popovich in the next few years). In nine seasons with Bulls, he netted 545 wins and a .738 winning percentage. (He also won 610 games in 11 seasons with the Lakers.)
Quenneville has only won the Jack Adams Award, given to the NHL's top coach, once as well -- and for a 51-win St. Louis Blues team at the turn of the century, no less. His .651 winning percentage is the best in franchise history. He's 172 wins behind Billy Reay for tops in franchise history, but Reay had twice the seasons in Chicago, no Stanley Cups and won at a .589 clip.
For the trogs who measure greatness purely on championships -- ya know, the ones who stammer when you point out their logic makes Trent Dilfer a better quarterback than Dan Marino and that Robert Horry should be on basketball's Mt. Rushmore -- Quenneville probably won't match Jackson's six here. Quenneville's never had a Michael Jordan of the ice, and the Blackhawks have hemorrhaged more talent after championships than the Bulls ever did.
Jonathan Toews and Patrick Kane are a once-in-a-generation duo, as were Jordan and Scottie Pippen, but their coach can't lean on them to play 90 percent of a period and take over a game. You can't mount a methodical comeback late in hockey the way basketball allows. The team that's leading entering the third period probably wins -- just shy of 80 percent of the time this season actually. (The Blackhawks are 15-0-0 when leading after two periods in 2015-'16). What happens in those first two periods is a testament to the man on the bench.
Entering Thursday's road matchup with the Montreal Canadiens, the Blackhawks are riding an eight-game winning streak. That's cool, and it's worth noting...
Again, Quenneville's working with a roster that wasn't supposed to be an upper-echelon contender due to offseason salary cap attrition -- as was the case after the title in 2010 and the one in 2013 -- and again it's contending. Chicago entered Thursday with the third-most points in the NHL, and that's with Coach Q's intense cursing and quiet humor on the bench.
"You hear new guys come into our room and sit on the bench and they love talking about the things they can't believe come flying out," Jonathan Toews told the Daily Herald. "I won't get into some of the stuff that goes on between our bench and the refs, but he's got some great one-liners when we score goals. That definitely loosens the guys up a little bit."
Lip reading on camera makes for easy awareness of expletives and sometimes body language.
We've seen what happens with hardasses in this town, which is why Quenneville's emotional variance has worked.
"Yeah, he's quite hysterical out there," Andrew Shaw said. "He's got some lines that the boys always repeat, that's for sure. They're not all R-rated, but it's one of those things you keep within the team, I think."
Ditto to the Popovichian delicate balance of knowing when to hit the gas and pump the brake.
"He has a good feel for our locker room — when we need to bear down and get kicked in the butt, and when we need some rest," defenseman Brent Seabrook said. "He's great that way."
Maybe the greatest respect Quenneville gets off the ice is the criticism of his roster handling, line juggling and pet players and doghouses. There's no free pass for him on this city's great acerbic blogs, which at times get heat for being too hard on the coach with three rings who keeps winning despite at times defying logic.
From Andrew Cieslak over at The Committed Indian earlier this week:
(Don't) think the snide comments on Twitter went unnoticed about how the blogosphere is going piss its collective pants at the news as if any writer for this site, or any other blog with actual content, isn't quite pleased with situation behind the bench. If you're looking for a hockey blog with recap titles like 'Quenneville Pushes All The Right Buttons Yet Again' and 'Players Fail To Execute Brilliant Strategy you might want to check out Blackhawks dot com. Quenneville is a hall of fame coach and his record speaks for itself. Still, it'd be cool if he didn't like guys like Brandon Mashinter. Nuance is dead and the internet done killed it.
But then this week, Quenneville indirectly received praise from the greatest to ever play hockey. In an ESPN radio interview Tuesday, Wayne Gretzky spoke of the Hawks' success this decade as compared to the great dynasties of the game's history.
"What the organization has been able to do to keep their team as competitive as they are -- to have to move players out only on the basis of salary cap issues for business purposes -- and yet be able to sustain the record and the way they play each and every night and the competitive spirit and opportunity to win another Stanley Cup, it's probably even harder to do today than what the (New York) Islanders did in the 80s or what the (Edmonton) Oilers did in the late 80s," Gretzky said. "It's just difficult, and they deserve all the credit in the world."
It could be harder than ever before for the Blackhawks to contend for a Stanley Cup this spring, yet they show all the signs heading toward May hockey and perhaps beyond.
Much of "all the credit in the world" lands on Joel Quenneville. As for how to dole out the "greatest coach in Chicago sports history" credit?
Maybe he and the mustache deserve some of that too.
Tim Baffoe is a columnist for CBSChicago.com. Follow Tim on Twitter @TimBaffoe. The views expressed on this page are those of the author, not CBS Local Chicago or our affiliated television and radio stations.
