NHL Hot Seat: NHL Coaches on the Hot Seat in 2025-26

The job security in the NHL is notoriously bad. 

Even some of the best coaches in the league will get tossed at the first sign of trouble. Front office executives almost always look to change who’s behind the bench before they look to change who’s on the ice. 

With that history, we may end up getting a coach fired pretty soon, and there’s a good chance that one of the following coaches could be on the way out following a disappointing start for their team. 

Here are four coaches with the hottest seats so far this regular season. 

Jim Hiller, Kings

Los Angeles will have a tough road ahead this season, whether head coach Jim Hiller is there or not. 

The Kings are off to a 2-3-2 start this season, and currently hold a -6 goal differential. 

Their odds to win the Stanley Cup have dropped from +2000 at opening to +2800, and their odds to win the division have fallen from +650 to +950. 

With the retirement of center and captain Anze Kopitar now imminent following this season, Los Angeles must consider what new era of Kings hockey will look like and whether Hiller is the man to lead them into it.

Hiller was elevated from an assistant coaching job with the Kings to interim head coach following the dismissal of Todd McLellan in the middle of the 2023-24 season. Hiller stuck around with the team after leading them to a playoff berth later that season. 

Los Angeles has lost to the Oilers in the first round in each of Hiller’s two years as head coach. 

It seemed like, following last year’s playoff exit and the hiring of new general manager Ken Holland, that the team at least considered moving on from Hiller. Now, a few weeks into the season, Holland may be rethinking that decision. 

Jon Cooper, Lightning

Bear with me on the following analogy…

If a golfer holds his club up in the air during every lightning storm for 14 years straight and never gets struck, does it mean that he’s immune to lightning or that every time he steps out onto the course again, the odds of him getting struck just get bigger and bigger?

That’s what I’m hung up on here with Tampa Bay’s head coach, Jon Cooper, the longest tenured coach in the league. 

Since the Lightning hired Cooper in 2013, he’s led them to 11 playoff appearances and two Stanley Cup wins. He’s held strong while all of the contenders around him have replaced their head coaches over and over again. That stability was key to establishing Tampa Bay’s winning culture, but if the winning goes away, does Cooper become more expendable?

After being considered a favorite to make the playoffs and a contender once again in the Eastern Conference, the Lightning are off to a 1-3-2 start, the worst record through the first six games in Cooper’s tenure. 

This isn’t to say that all is lost with Tampa Bay. They can probably still make the playoffs. But could the Lightning’s top brass have a quick trigger in moving on from Cooper after a rough start?

To go back to the opening, is Cooper safe due to his longevity with the team, or will it give cause for Tampa Bay to look for a new coach for the first time in a decade?

If the Lightning do make the surprise move to fire him, Cooper will probably be scooped up by another NHL team within an hour of his firing. 

Lindy Ruff, Sabres

Buffalo has tried everything to fix their team over the more-than-a-decade period that the team hasn’t made the playoffs. 

In doing so, they’ve answered that Ship of Theseus thought experiment — the Ancient Greek paradox that asks whether replacing every part of a ship one-by-one makes it a different ship or not — because they’ve replaced every part of the Sabres ship, and it still sucks. 

Someone in the Buffalo front office probably felt really smart when they brought up the idea of hiring Lindy Ruff, the 65-year-old who coached more than a thousand games for the Sabres between 1997 and 2013. Ruff’s original tenure in Buffalo was one of the more successful periods for the team in its recent history, leading them to their most recent Stanley Cup appearance in 1998 and their only Presidents’ Trophy win in 2006. 

But 12 years after Ruff was originally fired by the organization, his presence behind the bench isn’t exactly bringing a fresh voice to a young team in desperate need of one. 

Ruff is old enough to be the grandfather of many of the players on the Sabres roster, is he really the voice they’d be willing to listen to?

Buffalo could try to shake up their team once more by firing Ruff, but will that really work to fix their problems? Maybe they should just pack up the team and move to Arizona.