Craig MacTavish interviews for vacant Minnesota Wild coaching post

[...]  MacTavish has been interviewed by Minnesota Wild general manager Chuck Fletcher for their vacant head coach job. It’s only the preliminary stage in Fletcher’s plan to find a new coach, but MacTavish was also in the running two years ago when Fletcher went for a younger face, Todd Richards. MacTavish, who coached the Oilers from 2000-09, got his master’s degree in business from Queen’s University late last year, and he has worked for TSN for the past two seasons. But he’s a coach first.

"I took a break and I’m recharged and want to get back into it," said MacTavish, without naming where. "I’m looking forward to the opportunity, but the opportunities are few and far between in this business. If it turns into an opportunity for me (somewhere), we’ll see."

Along with Minnesota, there are coaching vacancies with the Dallas Stars, New Jersey Devils, Ottawa Senators and Florida Panthers. The Senators and Panthers are rebuilding situations, which probably wouldn’t appeal to MacTavish. The others are Stanley Cup contending teams.

Washington coach Bruce Boudreau is also on the hot-seat after the Capitals went out four straight to the Tampa Bay Lightning in Round 2, but Caps GM George McPhee said Thursday he has no plans to let his coach go. However, owner Ted Leonsis might have something to say on the matter, too.

Richards was fired after his second season in Minnesota, with a year left on his contract. It’s expected Fletcher will hire somebody with a longer NHL resume this time around, although Chicago Blackhawks assistant coach Mike Haviland’s name has come up repeatedly.

Ken Hitchcock, who is coaching Canada’s world championship team in Slovakia, might be in the hunt, but nobody’s contacted him yet.

Dallas, which fired Marc Crawford after the season, likely has to wait until its ownership situation is resolved before hiring a new man with Montreal’s Kirk Muller, a former teammate of Stars GM Joe Niewendyk, a strong possibility there.

New Jersey could be waiting for Hitchcock to return from the worlds after Jacques Lemaire said he wouldn’t be back as head coach

MacTavish, who got the Oilers to the seventh game of the Stanley Cup final against the Carolina Hurricanes in 2006, left the club with one year remaining on his contract. 

The JftC Western Conference predictions are almost complete, with a level of detail heretofore unseen in human history. There's just a weeeeeee bit of detail missing in the data. So here are a couple of bonus polls to clear that up. There might be one more round, but hopefully not.

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**** it. I was going to schedule this post for tomorrow, but I'm impatient, so I'm posting now. This is the fourth and last in the series of polls which we will use to generate JftC predictions for the Western Conference final standings.

The first, second and third sets are here. Vote wantonly.

You'll notice that the format is slightly different in this (the last) set. That's because the "better/worse" criteria is useful for teasing apart clusters of teams generally considered to be close in quality, but useless in determining the how the perceived "top" of the conference relates to the perceived "bottom."

Which is why this last group of polls looks like this:

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This is the third set of polls for the JftC Western Conference predictions. In case you're arriving late to the party, we're doing a group prediction for the season, based on a series of interlocking polls. If you haven't yet, please vote in the first two series as well, here and here.

There will be one more set of polls -- posting tomorrow -- and then we'll have enough data to predict standings and point totals as well. Not that we'll be right or anything, but it will reflect what we think, as a group.

[POLLS AFTER JUMP]

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This is part 2 in our series of polls to determine the JftC group predictions for the 2010-11 Western Conference final standings. Yes, I know the Blue Jackets appear twice and the Oilers don't appear at all. If you haven't already, make sure you vote in the first batch of polls (#1-5).

[polls after jump]

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I've been trying to come up with a way for the JftC population to make, essentially, a group prediction for the season's final standings. Rather than just throwing every team up in one poll and saying, "who will make the playoffs, pick eight," and then ranking the answers, I've decided to go another route.

We're going to do five small polls at a time, each poll being a group of three Western Conference teams. Each poll will ask you to select the two best teams out of the three (obviously leaving one team out in the cold). Since there are 15 teams in the conference, each team will appear in one poll per poll-day (5 polls times 3 teams in each poll). And then the next day, or maybe a couple days later, we'll shuffle the teams into new groups of three and re-poll. I'm not sure how many times we'll repeat the exercise; until there is a clear pecking order from 1 to 15.

And then we'll do the East.

If it goes fast enough, maybe we'll do the playoffs, too.

That way, we'll avoid the problem I have every time I make my own predictions, which is that I really am focusing on a few teams and the rest just kind of fall where they have to fall to make it work.

So, anyway, here they are. Remember to vote twice in each poll.

[POLLS AFTER JUMP]

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This is an old poll (still open) that I thought I would repost since (1) it's summer, and (2) there's a lot more traffic on JftC now, so many members haven't voted. (polls after the jump...)

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