After Letting Them Go
Robert Bates When you’re looking at professional sports, there are typically two ways that information is shared after coaches and executive-level management are dismissed. Neither of them are direct.
In one scenario, a team will have a disastrous season or two, and the coach or exec is fired without much ceremony. It’s usually a publicly anticipated move (see John Tortorella with the Canucks in ‘13/’14), and words aren’t minced. The second, less common method is what’s more of a ‘soft dismissal’ — they’re relieved in such a way that it appears to have been a mutual and exhaustive decision, a coincidental reaching-the-end-of-the-rope that makes the parting less a messy firing and more of an amicable stepping down (see Terry Francona with the Red Sox in 2012).
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