Ranking Best Candidates to Replace Fired Pete DeBoer as New Jersey Devils Coach

On Friday, the New Jersey Devils put out a two-sentence release on their official website.

The first sentence confirmed reports that the team was making a coaching change; the second announced that the club would be making no further comment until general manager Lou Lamoriello had a chance to address his team on Saturday morning. 

As with all coaching changes, it's an open question to what degree the Devils' struggles have been the product of the coach and what percentage of the blame falls on the roster he was given to work with. It's a question that, again as with all coaching changes, will be given a partial answer by the work of DeBoer's successor (For more on this, see colleague Dave Lozo's assessment of DeBoer's work).

Who will that successor be? The following slideshow briefly profiles and ranks some potential candidates for the top job behind the New Jersey bench.  

9. John Tortorella

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Work history: Tortorella has a long track record behind NHL benches, coaching 936 regular-season games and winning the Stanley Cup with Tampa Bay in 2004. Most recently, he was head coach of the Vancouver Canucks in a disastrous stint that saw him fired after just one season.

Is he a good fit? Someone was bound to bring Tortorella's name up given his profile, but he doesn't seem a great fit for a Lou Lamoriello-run team. He also has some unpleasant personal history with the Devils under DeBoer. 

8. Dave Barr

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Work history: Barr is presently an assistant coach in New Jersey, a post he's held since 2011-12. He broke into the coaching ranks as an assistant for Dave Tippett with the Houston Aeros of the old IHL; he ended up coaching that team for one season and then spent four years at the helm of the OHL's Guelph Storm. He's previously been an assistant coach for Colorado and Minnesota.

Is he a good fit? Barr is an internal candidate, which means he's familiar with the current systems and players. His resume is a little on the thin side by NHL head coaching standards, though, he was the OHL's Coach of the Year in 2005-06. 

7. Rick Kowalsky

Work history: Kowalsky had a long, but not especially memorable, career as a player; he spent most of it at the ECHL level, where he ran up big point totals and piled up the penalty minutes. He eventually became a head coach at the same level, running the Trenton Devils (formerly the Titans) for four seasons before being promoted to run the Albany Devils in the summer of 2010. 

Is he a good fit? It's always worth looking at the AHL head coach in situations like these. Kowalsky has been part of the Devils organization for nearly a decade now, and while Albany has never been a powerhouse under his watch, New Jersey hasn't exactly made winning in the AHL a priority, either. 

6. Adam Oates

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Work history: Oates has a pretty brief work history; just a half-decade of coaching after a stellar NHL career. Two years of that experience came in New Jersey, where he was a Devils assistant coach. He had one solid year and one less impressive campaign in the top job in Washington after leaving New Jersey. 

Is he a good fit? If the Devils want to add someone who knows the team and its philosophy but also has experience as an NHL head coach, Oates is a pretty reasonable option for the job. 

5. Mike Foligno

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Work history: Foligno has never been an NHL head coach, but he's done pretty much everything else. The veteran of a better-than-1,000-game major league career has been a head coach in both the AHL and OHL and spent an additional half-decade as an NHL assistant coach. 

Is he a good fit? Like Kowalsky and Barr, Foligno is an internal candidate, meaning he's well-known to the Devils' decision-makers, and he's familiar with the players and systems. He was reasonably successful as a head coach at other levels and is a plausible NHL head coaching option. 

4. Paul MacLean

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Work history: The French-born MacLean played 700-odd games in the NHL and spent close to a decade as a head coach of various minor league teams. As Mike Babcock's assistant, he was part of the Stanley Cup-winning Red Wings in 2007-08 and until recently, was the head coach of the Ottawa Senators, a team with which he won the Jack Adams Award as the NHL's best coach in 2012-13.  

Is he a good fit? MacLean's teams in Ottawa tended to differ significantly from New Jersey's all-defence-all-the-time philosophy but doubtless, MacLean could alter his approach. He's a solid career coach with an impeccable record and would be a reasonable hire for nearly any NHL club. 

3. Dan Bylsma

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Work history: Bylsma led the Pittsburgh Penguins to the Stanley Cup in his first half-season as an NHL coach, guiding the team to a 18-3-4 record down the stretch. He'd had precious little previous experience as a coach, spending less than a full season in the top job in the AHL and less than five years as an assistant before that. He won the Jack Adams Award in 2010-11. 

Is he a good fit? Bylsma is going to be hired again somewhere; that Stanley Cup ring guarantees it. The New Jersey Devils are a very different team with a very different philosophy than Bylsma's Penguins, so it's perhaps not a natural fit.

2. Jacques Lemaire

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Work history: Although Jacques Lemaire tends to be closely associated with the Minnesota Wild team he ran for so many years, his greatest success came with the Devils. He coached the team to a Stanley Cup win in 1994-95, a year after winning the Jack Adams Award (which he would win again in Minnesota). His style may not be pretty, but it wins games, which is why he's 11th all-time with 617 NHL victories.  

Is he a good fit? Yes. He knows the team, he knows the players, he's currently employed by the Devils and nobody is better at coaching the defence-first, defence-second and defence-last philosophy that New Jersey so loves. The only question is whether the 69-year-old really wants to be an NHL head coach again. 

1. Ron Wilson

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Work history: Wilson has coached four different NHL teams, winning 648 games over a 1,400-game NHL career that stretches back to the early 1990s. He's been reasonably successful in most of his stops, though he couldn't do much with the Toronto Maple Leafs in his most recent posting. 

Is he a good fit? Yes. Wilson's ties to Lamoriello go back decades to when he played for a Providence College team coached by the now-Devils GM. He's an experienced NHL head coach with an impressive career, and he's had some time away from the game to recharge.