Gentille: Eleven years after failing Kyle Beach, Joel Quenneville gets what he deserved — a day late

VANCOUVER, BC - OCTOBER 28: Head coach Joel Quenneville of the Florida Panthers looks on from the bench during their NHL game against the Vancouver Canucks at Rogers Arena October 28, 2019 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.  (Photo by Jeff Vinnick/NHLI via Getty Images)"n
By Sean Gentille
Oct 29, 2021

We watched Kyle Beach sit in front of a camera on Wednesday night, shouldering guilt that he didn’t deserve, braver than the fleet of men who’d let him down.

At times, he was vulnerable. At times, he was tough. He was measured, mainly. He was sad, mainly. He was courageous, through it all.

He was also angry — noticeably, palpably, in a way that deviated from the rest of his words and the way he delivered them — once. He was angry when he talked about Joel Quenneville.

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We knew at the time that Quenneville — with a blend of cluelessness and hubris and moral failure that’s rare, but not rare enough — was prepping for his 1,768th game as an NHL head coach.

We know now that it may have been, and should be, his last. 

Quenneville resigned on Thursday night, after a meeting with NHL commissioner Gary Bettman in the afternoon. That’s good.

It’s good that the Blackhawks’ Hockey Man brain trust — one by one, a decade too late — is paying for how they betrayed Beach, and for the role their choice played in permitting the sexual assault of a minor in 2013. It’s irony, I suppose, that a bunch of guys whose reputations and bank accounts are built on the fetishization of accountability dodged it as long as they did.

Bettman, in a news release on Thursday night, said Quenneville was part of a Blackhawks group that “mishandled the 2010 sexual assault claim,” as if they botched on an office lunch order. Whoops, the accounting department showed up. Looks like we’ll be two pizzas short. 

That, from Bettman, is the sort of thing that makes it impossible to shake the feeling that Quenneville’s reckoning only arrived because Kyle Beach came forward — not just the words of the 107-page Jenner & Block report. Because we saw that it wasn’t enough for Quenneville to take a day off. It wasn’t enough for the Panthers to give him one. It wasn’t enough for the league to step in. Instead, they blew it. The opportunity to choose a course that was both morally right and PR-savvy? No thanks. We’re good.

And thus, we got Quenneville, choosing his suit and combing his mustache while Beach put a face and a voice to what we’d learned the day before.

“Stan Bowman has quoted Joel Quenneville saying — and this is not a quote, this is my words — saying that the playoffs, the Stanley Cup playoffs and trying to win a Stanley Cup was more important than sexual assault. And I can’t believe that,” Beach told TSN’s Rick Westhead.

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“As a human being, I cannot believe that, and I cannot accept that. I’ve witnessed meetings, right after I reported it to (mental skills coach) James Gary, that were held in Joel Quenneville’s office. There’s absolutely no way that he can deny knowing it and there’s absolutely no way that Stan Bowman would make up a quote like that, to somebody who served his organization and his team so well.”

It’s not that Quenneville had skated in the court of public opinion until that point, either. It was reasonable to expect the implication of Bowman, who resigned upon the report’s release on Tuesday, and John McDonough, who didn’t have a job to quit.

But Bowman putting Quenneville in the room? Quenneville putting Quenneville in the room? That, for whatever reason, seemed more of a surprise — but there he was, “agitated,” according to the report, and broken-brained, short-sighted and callous enough to keep Aldrich around for the stretch run. Quenneville knew, at minimum, that one of his assistants was trying to sleep with his players. Why he wouldn’t err on the side of prevention is baffling. In an alternate timeline, Quenneville tells Aldrich to get lost, go home and wait for the investigation. All it would’ve taken was one person in a room full of grown men to do the right thing. That could’ve been Quenneville, and it wasn’t.

Now, here we are. Whether it was shocking to see Quenneville on the Panthers bench against Boston on Wednesday night, with a career-wins chyron plastered below him, is almost immaterial. It was disgusting, and it was upsetting, and that, really, was all it needed to be. The response wasn’t universal, but it was close enough.

At some point on Thursday — maybe when we learned that Quenneville was heading back to South Florida rather than Detroit to link up with his now-former team — the right outcome started to feel a little more realistic. Before that, if you expected the worst — Joel Quenneville, still head coach of the Florida Panthers — it would’ve only been because you paid attention. This is a sport that, at times, goes out of its way to stay stuck in 1994.

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More relevantly, it’s a sport run by attorneys. And there seemed to be just enough wiggle room for Quenneville to slide through. After all, he showed up to the big meeting late, the report said, and he couldn’t quite remember whether Beach or Aldrich’s names came up at all, actually. Strange thing, memories. Sure, Quenneville seemed to give Aldrich a glowing performance evaluation after Aldrich left the team in disgrace but … that’s the sort of thing a manager does for their direct reports, right?

That’s how it would’ve happened, certain as the sunrise, had Kyle Beach and Joel Quenneville not each spent their Wednesday nights on television. Accountability’s arrival is better late than never. Good coaches usually understand that much. Usually. Lawyers? Eh.

And so, this is probably where it ends for Quenneville. He chose a Cup run over the wellbeing of a 20-year-old. Kyle Beach is 31 now, speaking from a path to healing and gratitude that his coach and organization denied him for 11 years. As for the league and the sport? It’s time to start doing the right things for the right reasons. It’s time to change.

(Photo: Jeff Vinnick / NHLI via Getty Images)

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Sean Gentille

Sean Gentille is a senior writer for The Athletic covering the NHL. He previously covered Pittsburgh sports with the The Athletic and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the NHL for Sporting News, and he's a graduate of the University of Maryland. Follow Sean on Twitter @seangentille