St. Louis Blues: Just how bad was Mike Yeo as head coach?

The St. Louis Blues success under Craig Berube draws some questions about their former head coach Mike Yeo.

The St. Louis Blues had an amazing turnaround, going from last in the entire National Hockey League as the calendar turned to 2019 to earning their place in the Stanley Cup Final. Reasons for their historic comeback look specifically at two things – the emergence of rookie goaltender Jordan Binnington and their play under head coach Craig Berube (plus their lack of productive play under former head coach Mike Yeo).

Technically, Berube is still the “interim” head coach, but after his team’s performance, Stanley Cup win or not, that “interim” part is sure to be removed this summer. The Blues’ day and night transition don’t put the failures of Yeo in perspective.

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With all the praise Berube is getting, including a nomination for the NHL’s Jack Adam’s award, it’s easy to forget that at one point in the not so distant past, the Blues had a different bench boss who had drastically different results.

With Berube’s hiring the turning point in this season, it’s fair to say that a good portion of the blame for the Blues not so hot start falls on Yeo. Since he’s destined to take his next NHL coaching assignment as an assistant under Alain Vigneault in Philadelphia it’s fair to ask, just how bad of a coach was he?

Yeo burst onto the scene as the NHL’s youngest head coach at the time during the 2011-2012 season. The next year, he took the Zach Parise and Ryan Suter led Minnesota Wild to three consecutive playoff appearances before getting fired in 2016.

He was immediately hired as heir apparent to Ken Hitchcock in St. Louis and made the playoffs his first season, only to fall short the next season and be fired halfway through the next.

Yeo’s failures as St. Louis’s head coach could be summarized to one thing – a lack of structure. Yeo tried to turn the Blues into a high scoring speed machine with equal scoring contributions from all four lines.

Sounds good in theory, but it obviously didn’t work. With each player not given a specific role, they had no specific place, let alone something to be held accountable for. Yeo’s system would have been perfect if he had a team of equally balanced, all-star talent to fill an entire roster, but no NHL team, let alone the Blues, is built as such.

Lack of structure and motivation were frequent criticisms of Yeo. Former NHL player Nail Yakupov had a short stint with St. Louis under Mike Yeo. While Yakupov will most likely go down as one the biggest draft busts in the salary cap era, that’s not entirely Yeo’s fault.

However, when Neil Yakupov’s father was asked specifically about Mike Yeo and his coaching of his son, Yakupov’s father had more than a few choice words.

"“When the coach is an idiot, the team will fail.”“Mike Yeo didn’t succeed at Minnesota, he only lost time there. A similar situation is happening now. The team will not fight for such a coach. I saw them play, familiar with their system. This club should fight for the Stanley Cup, but, again, if the coach is an idiot, then you can forget about it. It seems to me that Yeo doesn’t understand anything at all in hockey. Unrestrained, unrestrained. I wouldn’t even trust the children’s team to him.”"

Yakupov’s father makes an interesting point when he says Yeo “lost time” in Minnesota. One of the most valuable things a team has is time that quickly runs out when they open their Stanley Cup window.

Throughout their entire franchise history, the Minnesota Wild’s window had never been more open than the 2012 free agency signings of Parise and Suter. Under Yeo’s leadership, they never went further than the second round and only won 11 postseason games in those three playoff seasons.

Now, Yeo is far gone from the State of Hockey and as Suter and parties decline, those contracts look worse and worse. Valuable years were wasted under Yeo’s watch.

His hiring was no shot in the dark, as he had been hired as Minnesota’s head coach the immediate year before in 2011-2012. Perhaps Minnesota’s front office thought one year behind the bench was enough for him to tackle on the task and expectations that came with Parise and Suter. Eventually, their patience would run out after he was given a few too many chances.

Interestingly enough, a journalist from St. Louis Today was able to get in contact with Yeo and ask his thoughts on the Blues recent success and what impact he could have had on the team:

"He never wanted to go on the record. He was, understandably, disappointed. He did feel like he would have turned the team around if given more time. I think most coaches feel that way after they have been fired.But, it’s hard to argue with the personality the team has taken under Berube. And Berube’s message — get the puck down low and play a heavy game — is a contrast from Yeo’s plan of making the Blues a speedier team. Clearly, it was the right move."

While it’s clear Yeo is being honest and not giving the answer the media wanted to hear, his honesty in his own disappointment will only get him so far. He refuses to take credit for his shortcomings with St. Louis and how his style of coaching failed.

Yeo didn’t have to admit defeat but saying “it would have worked if we kept trying it” isn’t the best way to defend lackluster coaching.

With Yeo set to join the Flyers coaching staff next year, the decision to hire him was puzzling. Vigneault has said that he intends to use Yeo as a defensive specialist in charge of the penalty kill.

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While Yeo does have a lot of experience under his belt by now, success has eluded him, and his new specified coaching assignment seems confusing at best. Maybe Vigneault seems something in him that we don’t, but Yeo still has a lot to prove before he’s considered an effective coach.

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