Joel Quenneville, who won the Stanley Cup three times with Chicago, still believes he deserves a chance to coach.
Former NHL head coach Joel Quenneville spoke for the first time on Tuesday about the 2021 harassment scandal that led to his resignation as Florida Panthers helm.
One of the reserve players of the Chicago Blackhawks in the playoffs in the 2009–2010 season Kyle Beach said in 2021 that then-Blackhawks video coach Brad Aldrich had taken advantage of him.
According to an independent investigative report by Chicago, then-head coach Quenneville and the management knew about the suspicions against Aldrich, but no action was taken at the club.
The Blackhawks won the Stanley Cup under Quenneville that season. Quenneville, who coached the Florida Panthers in 2021, resigned as a result of the scandal.
Quenneville, who is second in the all-time wins statistics for NHL head coaches (969 wins, 1,768 games), has not coached since the uproar.
Quenneville, who has been out of the public eye for a long time, told The Cam and Strick –on the podcast that he only heard about the harassment case in 2021, while sitting on a plane on his way to New York.
– I feel bad when I read that our video coach has taken advantage of the player. It was also disturbing that Aldrich used the coaching ladder to influence the player, Quenneville said.
– Everything happened very quickly. To be honest, at first I thought I wouldn’t have to miss a single match.
However, Quenneville said in a podcast that he heard in May 2010 that the video coach had been spending time with the players and may have sent them inappropriate messages.
– I should have asked more. If I had known more, I could have handled it.
Quenneville doesn’t blame anyone at the Blackhawks for what happened, but feels that he himself should have done a few things differently.
He said that he ended up resigning from the Panthers after discussing the matter with the NHL commissioner by Gary Bettman with.
Beach talked about his experiences in a television interview just before Quenneville’s last game. The coach says that he contacted the player shortly after this.
– It took him some time before he could talk about it with me. The content of our conversation does not belong to others.
Quenneville, who won the Stanley Cup three times with the Blackhawks, still believes he deserves a chance to coach. He said that he had been in contact with several different NHL clubs and that he was interested in coaching.