George McPhee, general manager for Las Vegas' NHL team, has a lot of choices to make during the next 11 months, one of which is whom to select as the franchise's first coach.
Coaches come in many different styles. Some are motivators, some are teachers, and others are all about managing the bench. It mightr be hard for McPhee to select the perfect coach without knowing the team's roster, but it might also be difficult to pick the team without having some idea of who will coach them.
So far, a lot of the speculation has been grounded in traditional analysis but given the team's commitment to hockey analytics, it makes sense to consider this question from a purely statistical perspective.
Using modern coaching metrics to estimate experience and success, the net was cast far and wide to include all recent former NHL coaches, current NHL assistants with head coaching experience at any level, AHL head coaches, and additional coaches of prominence in the U.S. college ranks, Canadian major junior leagues and the ECHL. In the end, 185 coaches were placed on the following chart, where a few interesting names have pulled away from the pack.