Ken Hitchcock has been coach for the Philadelphia Flyers for going on 3 seasons. He has won divisional championships 6 out of the 7 years he has coached in the NHL, including the Stanley Cup once. He has always been a winning coach going back to 1984 with the Kamloops in the WHL. With the Flyers stumbling as of late I have started to hear some fans start to bring up the F word when it comes to Hitchcock. I totally disagree with them. He deserves at least 5 full years of coaching before making judgment on his ability.

There has been talk in the blogs about Hitchcock that has nothing to do with his coaching ability. I usually let the name calling and such pass, but since James Mirtle wrote about it, I figure I put in my two cents worth.

Apparently over at HockeyBird.com someone didn’t like how the game ended with Donald Brashear going after Darius Kasparaitis on March 2. But let’s talk about Kasparaitis, it’s a known fact he is a borderline dirty player. I have nothing against borderline guys, it is what it is. But you have a situation where Simon Gagne, Flyers leading scorer, is injured in the Olympics by Kasparaitis on a borderline hit. Then in the beginning of the March 2 game Kasparaitis taking a run at Forsberg trying to take his head off. Someone had to respond and Brashear knows his role which is, in a way, to let Kasparaitis know they didn’t appreciate his play that much. The give and take is a part of hockey.
People have called what Brashear did dumb. He got a 1 game suspension and Hitchcock was fined 10 grand. Personally I think the suspension and fine rules, new this year are dumb. But that is a whole other article. The Flyers play as of late has been mediocre. No hustle, no passion, no heart. Brashear was one of the few showing they actually cared that night, for Brashear that is a good thing.

But back to Hitchcock, HockeyBird had this to say about him.
“I don’t want to get too personal and judgmental here, but Ken Hitchcock is a big fat guy. Just enormous. Corpulent. How fat is he? Every time someone walks around him, they get one year older. He’s huge. Fat and flabby. Just a big bowl of chub.”

I’m glad you didn’t get too personal. This isn’t the first time HockeyBird has looked so juvenile, from March 3, 2004.
Fat guy + bad suit = shooting fish + barrel. Hitch’s corpulence gives him a Brando-esque stateliness, and his Flyers players don’t seem to rally around him as much as simply being drawn into orbit by a strong gravitational pull. I don’t know what sophisticated system of girdles and pulleys and buttresses are holding his seams together, but whoever tailored it should be working for NASA. Work it, fat man!

The search feature on the site is a wonderful thing.

I personally don’t care about the name calling, it just shows the level of class whatever it is, the blog authors have. I do want to point out whoever is interested to this article on Ken Hitchcock written back in 1998. The article talks about him losing his father to cancer at age 14, his girlfriend to a car accident at age 15 and his mother to cancer at age 20. Events that led to his weight gain, and how he has worked thru these demons. Maybe if people realize why certain people are a certain way there will be more understanding shown.