Flyers Hire Todd Reirden, Dylan Crawford As Assistant Coach
6/20: Philadelphia has made Reirden’s appointment official. They also announced they’ll be hiring Dylan Crawford to an assistant role as well. Crawford spent the last seven years in various video coaching positions across the NHL – first spending three years as an assistant video coach in Chicago, then getting promoted to head video coach for one year, and most recently continuing to serve the last three years as head video coach for the Vancouver Canucks. The 35-year-old Crawford’s move to assistant coach will mark the next big step in his young coaching career.
6/19: The Flyers have “made progress” toward hiring former Capitals head coach Todd Reirden to complete Rick Tocchet‘s staff of assistants, reports Frank Seravalli of Daily Faceoff.
Reirden, 54 later this month, is the third and final assistant hire for the Flyers this offseason, concluding what’s been a complete staff turnover aside from goaltending coach Kim Dillabaugh. He’s likely geared as a replacement for former associate coach Brad Shaw, who took over as interim head coach in the final days of the season after John Tortorella’s firing but finished as the runner-up to Tocchet in their head coaching search several weeks ago. He’ll presumably manage the club’s defense group while new assistants Jaroslav Svejkovský and Jay Varady, whose hirings were announced earlier this month, will handle other duties.
Reirden, a former NHL defenseman himself, has spent his entire coaching career in the Metropolitan Division, mostly with the Penguins. He landed his first professional job there as an AHL assistant for the 2008-09 season but was promptly promoted to head coach when the Pens brought Dan Bylsma up from the minors to coach the NHL club en route to the 2009 Stanley Cup. Reirden spent one full season as head coach in WBS before being promoted again to an assistant role on the NHL bench in 2010. He spent four years in the role before being fired alongside Bylsma in the 2014 offseason.
The Illinois native was quickly scooped up by the Capitals to serve as an assistant on Barry Trotz’s staff, and he was named their head coach four years later when Trotz departed the organization following their Stanley Cup victory in 2018. Reirden compiled an 89-46-16 (.642) record in two seasons behind the Washington bench before being fired following the 2020 Stanley Cup Playoffs.
Reirden then returned to Pittsburgh, where he again served as an associate coach under Mike Sullivan from 2020-21 until the former’s dismissal last year. While both he and Tocchet share a former employer with the Pens, their tenures didn’t overlap there. Nonetheless, he’ll get his next NHL job after not coaching at all during the 2024-25 season.
Penguins Part Ways With Associate Coach Todd Reirden
The Penguins are not bringing back associate coach Todd Reirden next season, the club announced Friday. He was on an expiring contract.
Reirden has served on head coach Mike Sullivan‘s staff for the past four seasons, overseeing their power play and defense corps. The Penguins hired the former NHL defenseman in the 2020 offseason after he was let go as head coach of the Capitals, a role he held for two years.
Over Reirden’s tenure, the Penguins have had one of the most consistently underwhelming man-advantage units in the league. Their 19.9% power play success rate over the past four seasons ranks 18th in the NHL, surprisingly low considering the talent level of Sidney Crosby, Jake Guentzel, Kris Letang and Evgeni Malkin that they’ve had at their disposal nearly the entire time. General manager Kyle Dubas gave Reirden a new toy to play with when he acquired elite offensive blue-liner Erik Karlsson this summer, but it somehow had a worse effect. Pittsburgh’s power play clicked at just 15.3% this season, only ahead of the Blue Jackets (15.1%) and Flyers (12.2%).
The Penguins were middle-of-the-pack defensively, allowing 30.2 shots per game, only 0.4 more than the league median this season. The pairing of Karlsson and Marcus Pettersson had a strong campaign at even strength, controlling 54.7% of expected goals when deployed together, per MoneyPuck. But free-agent signing Ryan Graves struggled in his top-four role, posting worse results than Pettersson when utilized with both Karlsson and Letang.
Pittsburgh finished just three points out of the final playoff spot in the Eastern Conference this season. Even an average power play and slightly improved results from Graves likely would have given them the two additional wins they needed to return to postseason action.
Reirden becomes a free agent, and while he likely won’t be under consideration for any head coaching vacancies, could still land on an NHL bench somewhere next season. Before assuming the head coaching job with Washington in 2018, he’d spent four years there as an associate and assistant coach under Barry Trotz. His first NHL gig came with the Penguins in 2008, serving as the assistant and head coach for AHL Wilkes-Barre/Scranton for three years before spending another four as an NHL assistant.