The Chicago Blackhawks fired coach Luke Richardson after two-plus seasons, the team announced Thursday afternoon.
Under Richardson’s leadership, the Hawks this season trudged to a 8-16-2 start, the worst record in the NHL. Richardson amassed a 57-118-15 record with the Hawks, the eighth worst in NHL history among coaches with at least 100 games.
“Today I made the difficult decision to move on from Luke as our head coach,” general manager Kyle Davidson said in a news release. “We thank him for his efforts and contributions to the organization and our community. As we have begun to take steps forward in our rebuilding process, we felt that the results did not match our expectations for a higher level of execution this season and ultimately came to the decision that a change was necessary. We wish Luke and his family all the best moving forward.”
Rockford IceHogs coach Anders Sorensen takes over as interim coach and will be behind the bench Saturday when the Hawks play host to the Winnipeg Jets at the United Center.
Sorensen, 49, joined the organization as a development coach in 2013 until being named an IceHogs assistant beginning in 2018-19. He has a 117-89-16 record in 229 career AHL games, and the IceHogs reached the playoffs in his three seasons as head coach.
“I fully support Kyle’s decision in making this change as he continues to do what is needed to move our team forward,” Hawks Chairman and CEO Danny Wirtz said in the release. “I have the utmost confidence in him and the rest of our Hockey Operations team as they begin their search for the next head coach of the Chicago Blackhawks.”
Richardson, 55, was hired as the team’s 40th coach in June 2022 and was given the keys to a rebuilding team — his calm demeanor seen at the time as an ideal fit for developing young talent — while tasked with creating a winning culture.
But even a rebuild has its limits.
Among coaches in Hawks franchise history, regardless of length of tenure, only six had a winning percentage equal to or worse than Richardson’s .339: Hugh Lehman (.167), Barney Stanley (.217), Herb Gardiner (.219), Ebbie Goodfellow (.282), Frank Eddolls (.307) and Dirk Graham (.339).
But Hawks weren’t worried about the past. They’re more concerned with the future.
Any number of issues could have been the death knell for Richardson’s tenure.
The Hawks have taken great pains to surround 2023 No. 1 pick Connor Bedard with the right teammates and staff and give him the support he needs to fulfill the generational talent they believe he has.
But late last month, Bedard admitted having a crisis of confidence as he endured a 12-game stretch without a goal, the longest drought of his career.
Davidson signed a free-agent haul of proven veterans not only to help boost Bedard to the next level but shore up the defense and other deficiencies in the Hawks’ game that led them to finishing last and third from last the previous two seasons.
However, for some of those veterans, joining the Hawks has had more of a negative impact on their individual games than success in lifting the team’s fortunes.
Even defense, Richardson’s core competency as a former NHL blueliner, has fallen on hard times in recent games.
It’s not a reach to say the Hawks were expecting to see better results.
Davidson said before the season opener in Salt Lake City that it’s “up to the guys in the locker room and the coaches to figure out what the trajectory of this season is going to be.”
“We’re optimistic, the team’s optimistic, you can feel it around the facility that guys are excited to get going here,” he said. “That remains to be seen.”
When asked how he would evaluate Richardson, Davidson said in the past that he wanted to see progress, though he shied from quantifying it in terms of wins and losses. However, just like Davidson judges prospects trying to stick in the NHL, he has said it would be based on performance.
“There’s a lot of nuance to how that evaluation will unfold, given what the team looks like,” Davidson said during training camp. “Hopefully no injury situations to the extent we experienced last year that we have to deal with. I think it’s just an ongoing execution from a team and systems standpoint.
“The baseline should be that the effort is never absent, you know? The compete should be there every night. In the NHL, that’s kind of a low bar to ask, but I want this to be a hard-working team and a team that never takes a night off and is not, you’re coming either to the United Center or we’re coming into your rink on the road and you know it’s not going to be an easy game because we’re going to lay it all out on the line trying to win.
“But we’ll let them figure out that identity.”
That identity never materialized fully.
By their own admission, players consistently said they need to “play simple,” but they routinely would stray from the game plan when met with adversity.
The early season was marked by some high-profile (and questionable) healthy scratches to juice up a player’s performance, and Richardson constantly scrambled forward lines in a desperate attempt to spark the offense.
Like everything else about the team, maybe it would work for a while — maybe — but ultimately it didn’t prove to be a long-term fix.
While discussing the defensive breakdowns against the Boston Bruins in a 4-2 loss Wednesday — Richardson’s last game as Hawks coach — he made an assessment that not only applied to that defeat but to any number of issues through his nearly 2½ seasons in Chicago.
“It’s hard to pinpoint it,” he said. “We’re working on things as we see fit after a game, then something else creeps in. So we just have to keep working at it until we can kind of correct all areas and make sure that we’re 100 percent focused on our duties and execute them every game.”
2024 was not a great year to be a head coach in Chicago.
Richardson’s firing Thursday rounds out the list — for now.
This story has been updated.
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