Hurricanes continue to invest in Rod Brind’Amour with head coach promotion
After Bill Peters’ departure, the Carolina Hurricanes have hired Rod Brind’Amour as their new head coach.
The Carolina Hurricanes have missed the playoffs in eight straight seasons now, and after the last four under Bill Peters he exercised an out clause in his contract and left the team.
But a fairly new owner, who has shaken up the front office, has settled on an internal candidate to replace Peters. According to Elliotte Friedman of Sportsnet, Rod Brind’Amour will officially be named the Hurricanes’ next head coach later this week.
Brind’Amour has spent the last seven seasons as an assistant coach in Carolina, under Peters and his predecessor Kirk Muller. Brind’Amour spent one season before that as the director of player development for the Hurricanes, as he began a transition into coaching after spending the last nine-plus seasons of his playing career with the franchise.
Immediately after Peters’ departure, Brind’Amour surfaced a potential frontrunner to take over as Carolina’s head coach. He even hinted at having reached his apex as an assistant coach, though interest from elsewhere as a head coaching candidate is not known to have materialized.
"I don’t think as an assistant I’m going to get any better or learn any more. So now’s the time,” Brind’Amour added. “They’re going to find the best guy to do it, and if it’s me, that’s great, and if not I understand. But I felt like I could at least step up and see if it could happen.“I think the attraction to me is you can really put your plan in place and decide how to pull all the strings. You decide the ice time. You decide who’s playing or not, and in certain situations. That’s the allure of it. They know I’m interested and we’ll see where it goes."
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Former NHL players are hardly certain to have success in coaching (see Wayne Gretzky, etc.). But Brind’Amour has spent some time working his way up the ladder, so he theoretically has a better chance to succeed than most we’ve seen.