ST. LOUIS \u2014 The St. Louis Blues are making a move with their coaching staff.<\/p>\n
The organization fired AHL Springfield coach Steve Konowalchuk, who was in his second season with the Thunderbirds. Steve Ott, in his ninth season as an assistant coach on the Blues\u2019 staff, will take over as the head coach of the Thunderbirds for the remainder of the season.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Blues want to thank Steve Konowalchuk for his contributions to our organization over the last two years and wish him all the best moving forward,\u201d Blues general manager Doug Armstrong said in a statement. \u201cWe\u2019re looking forward to Steve Ott taking over in Springfield to push our young players to get better every day and further their development path to become St. Louis Blues. The current staff will take over his duties with the Blues for the rest of this season.\u201d<\/p>\n
In two seasons under Konowalchuk, Springfield was 47-50-4-8 (.486 points percentage), including a record of 13-18-4-2 (.432) this season. The Thunderbirds are in last place in the Atlantic Division.<\/p>\n
Springfield assistant coach Chad Wiseman will serve as the interim head coach for Monday\u2019s game against the Wilkes-Barre\/Scranton Penguins and remain in place until Ott can join the team later this week.<\/p>\n
The Blues are on a three-game road trip, which began with a 5-0 loss to the Edmonton Oilers Sunday night. They are off Monday, but return to the ice against the Winnipeg Jets Tuesday before wrapping up the trip Friday against the Dallas Stars.<\/p>\n
Ott, 43, joined the Blues in the summer of 2017 and has worked under head coaches Mike Yeo, Craig Berube, Drew Bannister and Jim Montgomery. He played 14 seasons in the NHL, including 122 games with the Blues (2014-2016).<\/p>\n
\u201cHe\u2019s an extremely talented coach,\u201d Montgomery said Monday. \u201cPlayers love him. Staff loves him. You have to have head coaching experience to be able to get a head coaching job in the NHL \u2014 it helps \u2014 and this is the opportunity he\u2019s going to get: go down to Springfield and work in the second-best league in the world.<\/p>\n
\u201cI told him, he\u2019s going to be a great head coach. He\u2019s got all the qualities, he\u2019s got all the confidence in the world, and he\u2019s going to love it. Every day, you make the final decision. \u2026 I know he\u2019s going to do a great job. He\u2019s going to really help develop our prospects. And, for himself, his personal growth in these next three months is going to be extreme for him, in an extremely positive way.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ott has been in charge of the Blues\u2019 power play for much of his time as an assistant coach. This season, the unit has struggled to find consistency, ranking No. 25 in the NHL (16.3 percent).<\/p>\n
Montgomery said Monday that he will assume Ott\u2019s role in that area.<\/p>\n
\u201cProbably until (the Olympic) break,\u201d Montgomery said. \u201cThen what it does is, it means that our communication levels when you have a smaller staff, they increase. You have to make sure we\u2019re dialing in about everything because everybody has to do a little bit more, which is good.\u201d<\/p>\n
On what he wants to see change with the power play, Montgomery added:\u00a0\u201cExecution and urgency. That would be the two things. I always felt Steve Ott had a great game plan, to the point where I continually learned from him daily with every different type of scheme the other team might have. He always had an answer for how we\u2019re going to make it work. I think right now it\u2019s about execution and urgency. We\u2019ve got to be getting to that net and that blue paint more often, that\u2019s all.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ST. LOUIS \u2014 The St. Louis Blues are making a move with their coaching staff. The organization fired…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":417622,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[66],"tags":[385,99,1610],"class_list":["post-417621","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nhl","tag-nhl","tag-sports","tag-st-louis-blues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/417621","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=417621"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/417621\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/417622"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=417621"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=417621"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=417621"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}