EVANSVILLE, Ind. – Over the years of the relatively brief existence of the Evansville IceMen franchise, the team’s fans have grown accustomed to coaching changes. The latest change, however, is unlike any before it.
Jason Reichart and Jack Collins each spent one season behind the IceMen bench before Rich Kromm took over and lasted three seasons. After Kromm’s contract was not renewed for a fourth campaign, Jeff Pyle logged a single season as the team’s bench boss.
In the summer of 2014, Dwight Mullins succeeded Pyle when he signed a two-year contract to become the fifth coach of the IceMen as the franchise entered its seventh season of operation. Mullins’ hiring was the culmination of a lengthy coaching search that featured over 20 serious candidates, and the two-year nature of his deal seemed to indicate that the coaching office’s revolving door might finally stop spinning.
But several months later as the calendar flipped from 2014 to 2015, Mullins’ time piloting the IceMen came to an abrupt end, just 29 games into that two-year contract. The first mid-season coaching change in IceMen history was the result of a historically poor start by the Evansville squad.
After Mullins coached his final game with the team on New Year’s Eve – a lackluster 3-0 home loss to Quad City in front of over 8000 fans – the IceMen were 9-16-4. Despite only having two winning seasons in franchise history, Evansville had never before registered fewer than 10 victories through a season’s first 29 games. And even though the month of December featured eight IceMen home games with only one road game outside the state of Indiana – and that was just across the Ohio border in Cincinnati – the IceMen finished the month with a putrid 1-9-2 record, the first time Evansville has ever gone a full calendar month with just a single victory.
When 2015 began, the IceMen ranked near the bottom of the 28-team ECHL in numerous key statistics – including winning percentage (25th at .379), power-play efficiency (26th at 11.9 percent including a league-worst 5.6 percent conversion rate at home), goal differential (25th at minus-26), goals scored per game (27th at 2.52), goals allowed per game (22nd at 3.41), shots on goal per game (26th at 26.62), and shots allowed per game (22nd at 31.97).
The results on the ice were proof of what IceMen COO Jim Riggs later told ESPN Evansville WJLT-FM: Mullins had apparently “lost the room.”
So less than 16 hours after the ball dropped over Times Square, the axe dropped on Mullins’ tenure as head coach in Evansville. The firing was announced on New Year’s Day, as the eyes of the hockey world were glued to the third period of the NHL’s Winter Classic.
Later that afternoon, Riggs and IceMen Owner Ron Geary appeared on WEHT-TV’s 4 p.m. newscast to discuss the change. Geary defended the franchise’s conga line of coaches as being all about “the pursuit of excellence,” and said that the IceMen simply want to reward their loyal fans by putting the best possible product on the ice.
Geary and Riggs were joined in WEHT’s studio by the newest man to join the conga line as the sixth head coach of the IceMen, 61-year old Toronto native Al Sims.
Sims is no stranger to the IceMen or hockey fans in the state of Indiana, having coached the Fort Wayne Komets to an impressive five championships in 10 seasons over two separate stints, including three straight titles during his second tenure. In between his runs with the Komets, Sims spent four seasons in the NHL (three years as an assistant coach in Anaheim and a single season as head coach in San Jose) and eight more seasons bouncing around the minors. But his legacy is most firmly attached to Fort Wayne, where he is the winningest coach in the history of the storied Komets franchise.
Before finding success in coaching, Sims was also an accomplished player who twice played in the Stanley Cup Finals. Drafted in 1973 in both the NHL and WHA, Sims ended up playing more than 500 NHL games (including playoffs) and suited up alongside some of the all-time greats in the process. As a rookie with the Boston Bruins, he finished the season plus-64 while serving as Bobby Orr’s partner on defense. During his time in the NHL, Sims also shared the ice with the likes of Phil Esposito and “Mr. Hockey” himself, Gordie Howe.
So what does Sims, a man with such an incredible hockey résumé, plan to do to turn things around in Evansville? It’s simple – literally. “Keep it simple.”
Sims believes that the key for the IceMen is simplifying the team’s game, especially on defense and the power-play. The defensive scheme cannot be too complex – hockey is such a fast game that you can’t waste time thinking, but must simply put yourself in position (physically and mentally) to react quickly to any situation. And with the man-advantage, Sims wants to see the IceMen eschew “fancy plays” in favor of a more basic approach – in particular, he wants the team to take more shots from the point, which can result in goals either directly or via tips and rebounds.
Not surprisingly given the position he played, Sims says he is a firm believer in the mantra that “defense wins championships.” While it may be difficult to acquire game-changing offensive talent at this juncture in the season, he thinks the IceMen can improve their goal differential and win more games by focusing on improving their team defense. In addition to simplifying the overall approach, Sims wants to see more consistent effort on the defensive end by everyone, including the forwards. “You must play hard defensively, or you won’t be playing,” he quipped.
In conjunction with playing harder, Sims wants the team to improve its conditioning. He feels as if the IceMen have really struggled at the end of shifts and periods, and he intends to change that. The first step in that direction came in the team’s first practice under Sims’ tutelage, which featured a plethora of skating drills and resulted in at least one player being on the brink of throwing up.
Perhaps more than anything, Sims feels as if the IceMen simply need to believe in themselves. After his hiring, he immediately met with Assistant Coach Josh Beaulieu and the team’s captains, and discovered that under Mullins, the team came to expect that bad things would happen and losses would be the end result. Sims wants to boost their collective confidence and instill an expectation to win, even when bad things do happen.
Sims thinks the IceMen already have a lot of good pieces in place, so a complete overhaul of the personnel is not on the immediate horizon. He does not plan to make “sweeping changes” to the roster, and insists that the players who are currently on the team will be given every chance to prove themselves worthy of a continued roster spot. (Although he does admit that he may explore signing his 25-year old son Jordan, a rookie forward out of the University of Connecticut who is currently playing with the SPHL Peoria Rivermen – but he is mindful of the delicate balance between favoritism and fairness that doing so would require.)
Whatever his methods, IceMen fans must now hope that Sims can make significant improvements as quickly as the coaching change itself came together. Riggs told WJLT that he and Geary decided to make a move on the Sunday before Christmas, when the IceMen had lost eight straight. Sims was the first person they contacted, and the deal was essentially done by New Year’s Eve.
Sims had been among Evansville’s preferred coaching candidates considered over the summer, before Mullins was ultimately chosen. At the time, Sims decided to pass on the job in order to stay in Ontario so he could tend to his widowed mother, who had been injured in a fall. He and his wife even moved in with her during her recovery. But with his mom’s health improved by year’s end, Sims simply could not turn down the IceMen a second time.
Though his hiring was announced on New Year’s Day, Sims did not officially take over until a week later, due to work visa regulations. (While his visa was pending approval, Beaulieu served as interim head coach for two games that Sims watched from the stands.) Sims will make his first appearance behind the IceMen bench this weekend, as the team visits Missouri and Wichita. His Ford Center debut will be Jan. 17 against Cincinnati, and he is eager to coach the home team in what he calls “by far the loudest arena I’ve ever been in.”
Despite inheriting a team that is now 9-18-4, Sims says he thinks the IceMen can still claw their way into a playoff spot. Evansville is fortunate to be in a top-heavy division that currently has four teams below .500, and a fifth that isn’t much better. The IceMen would be well out of post-season contention in any other division, but are just six points behind Wheeling in the race for the North Division’s final playoff berth. With more than half of the season still remaining, Sims believes he has ample time to fix what ails the IceMen and thus earn the franchise its first ECHL playoff appearance.
In sports, it is often said that “coaches are hired to be fired.” The Evansville IceMen have certainly done more than their fair share of hiring and firing over the past seven years while “pursuing excellence,” but they may have finally ventured down the right path in that pursuit – the path that ends at Al Sims’ mother’s house in Canada.
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