A season-opening nine-game losing streak has cost Utica Comets head coach Kevin Dineen his job.

The New Jersey Devils fired Dineen on Wednesday and installed Ryan Parent as Utica’s interim head coach for the rest of this season. Parent is in his seventh season as an AHL assistant coach for the New Jersey organization. Devils player development coach Eric Weinrich will take over as an assistant coach in Utica.

Utica has a league-worst 0-8-0-1 record and has already fallen nine points below the playoff line.

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The 37-year-old Parent played parts of 11 seasons as a defenseman after being selected 18th overall by Nashville in the 2005 NHL Draft. His playing career featured 107 NHL games with Philadelphia and Vancouver as well as 251 AHL games divided between Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Manitoba, Chicago, Norfolk, St. John’s, and Wilkes-Barre/Scranton before he retired following the 2015-16 season.

The Comets next play Friday night when they host Cleveland to start a stretch of three games in four nights.

Dineen, hired to lead Utica before the 2021-22 season, had considerable early success with the Comets. His club won its opening 13 games that first season and finished with a 43-20-8-1 record to take the Eastern Conference regular-season title. But the Comets had an early playoff exit that season, falling in a five-game series to Rochester. A year later they were swept 

by Laval in opening-round play before missing the Calder Cup Playoffs last season. During Dineen’s time with Utica, the likes of Alexander Holtz, Simon Nemec, and Kevin Bahl ranked among his graduates who went on to become regulars in New Jersey or elsewhere.

Dineen played 19 NHL seasons as a tenacious, dogged forward for Hartford, Philadelphia, Carolina, Columbus, and Ottawa before eventually moving into coaching. Starting with the Anaheim Ducks organization, he won the Louis A.R. Pieri Memorial Award as the AHL’s coach of the year in his first season with the Portland Pirates in 2005-06. He ended up spending six seasons as an AHL head coach for the Ducks and Buffalo Sabres before advancing to the NHL in 2011 as head coach of the Florida Panthers, where he spent parts of the next three seasons. From there he led the Canadian women’s team to a gold medal at the 2014 Winter Olympics before joining the Chicago Blackhawks as an assistant coach and winning the Stanley Cup in 2015. He returned to the Anaheim organization as the head coach of the San Diego Gulls for three seasons.

In-season coaching changes in the AHL are quite rare, particularly firings. Last season Kris Knoblauch departed the Hartford Wolf Pack for a head-coaching job with the Edmonton Oilers, and Drew Bannister was promoted from the Springfield Thunderbirds to the St. Louis Blues. In 2021-22, Jay Woodcroft (Bakersfield) and Derek King (Rockford) took NHL promotions. The last in-season firing of an AHL head coach was in November 2014 when Kurt Kleinendorst of the Iowa Wild was dismissed after 12 games.

Dineen has been one of the few coaches in the New Jersey organization to have any success winning at the AHL level. New Jersey’s previous AHL affiliate for four seasons, the Binghamton Devils, never qualified for the Calder Cup Playoffs. Prior to that, the Albany Devils missed in four of seven seasons, and three of four seasons the Lowell Devils failed to reach the postseason. The Albany River Rats missed the postseason six seasons in a row before splitting with New Jersey in 2006.

In all, going back to 2001, New Jersey AHL affiliates have only made the playoffs in six of the 22 seasons. The only time that a New Jersey-affiliated AHL club has won a playoff round came when Albany did so in 2016.

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