I was reading up on some stuff I missed yesterday when I saw a tweet from CSN’s Tim Panaccio that says “Terry Murray will be added to Dave Hakstol’s staff.” Well … that sure would be news, yes! But that’s not really what the story says.
Instead, it says that Murray — who currently coaches the Lehigh Valley Phantoms — has had conversations with Flyers general manager Ron Hextall, including what he might want to do next season. Could he help out Hakstol, who’s new to the NHL, behind the Flyers bench as an assistant coach?
He’d be interested in that, assuming no NHL head coaching jobs are available to him — and there’s no indication that Murray is a candidate for any of the remaining open gigs around the league. He also might just remain the head coach in Allentown. Via CSN, here’s Murray:
“[Ron Hextall] and I talked about [the Flyers] but there was no way he was going to interview me for the head coaching job. He wanted a younger coach and I completely agreed with that. But he did throw out whether I would be interested in something else in terms of an assistant role.
“Obviously, if there were another head coaching position with another team in the NHL, I would want to do that.
“The other option was to go back to Allentown [with the Phantoms]. … We’ll take our time and see where it goes.” … “I’m also very realistic where things are in the game and my age now and years of experience I have in the game as a head coach. Would I embrace an assistant’s role? Absolutely.”
So he might come to Philly, and he might stay in Allentown. We don’t know! Nobody does, yet.
Canadian paper speculates about Benoit Groulx to Flyers
We profiled Benoit Groulx back when the Flyers were still looking for a coach, and bringing him to Philadelphia would have been another off-the-board move, much like hiring Hakstol was. Groulx coached Claude Giroux in junior with Gatineau, and he’s led the Canadian U20 team as well.
He obviously didn’t get the job, but could the Flyers still have interest? There’s nothing hard to indicate that’s true, but a French-language newspaper in Canada, La Presse, has speculated about just that. Here’s the translation (via Google, but cleaned up a bit):
As head coach, the doors of the NHL now seem closed to the winner of the gold medal in the last World Junior Championships. In Philadelphia, the Flyers chose Dave Hakstol, a coach from the NCAA. The general manager Ron Hextall told the Philadelphia Daily News that he met another coach with no experience in the NHL during the hiring process.
Was it Benoit Groulx? Hextall offered no answer. Will Groulx could become an assistant with Claude Giroux’s club?
There’s not much to go off of here either, but it’s a respected paper in Canada speculating … maybe with some behind-the-curtain, off-the-record knowledge that they can’t say publicly. Who knows, really. Worth talking about, but far from anything official.
In any event, this is where we stand with the Flyers search for new assistant coaches. Still a whole lot of nothing when it comes to public info. It makes sense that Hextall and Hakstol would like to take their time on this, and that’s probably what they’re doing.
