Joe Sacco Hired as New Avs Head Coach

From www.tsn.ca

New Colorado Avalanche general manager Greg Sherman has apparently wasted no time in hiring a head coach.

According to the Denver Post, the club will announce the hiring of former player Joe Sacco at a 2pm pt news conference.

The move comes just one day after Sherman was named the new general manager of the team and that previous head coach Tony Granato had been fired.

Sacco has spent the last two seasons as a coach for the Lake Erie Monsters of the American Hockey League.  Last season, the Monsters won 34 games and finished out of the playoffs with 76 points.

Read the full article here

Instant analysis: Obviously, new Avs GM Greg Sherman thinks very highly of the opinion of columnist Woody Paige. If you missed it earlier this morning in the Morning Papers, Woody Paige opined that the Avs should not hire Sacco, deeming him unsuited for the head coaching position in the NHL. I can’t argue with him necessarily, as if he wasn’t able to lead the Avs farm team to success in the AHL, what evidence is there that he will be able to do so in the big leagues with a minor league roster? I suspect that Sacco is working for relatively cheap, which may have been an influence in this hiring. Really though, if I was Joe Sacco, given the talent around him on the Avs, I would be renting and not buying in the Denver area.