Has Joel Quenneville Coached His Last NHL Hockey Game? UPDATED

Update published 10:55 p.m.: After meeting with NHL commissioner Gary Bettman earlier today, Florida Panthers issued the following statement:

The original story is below:

Yesterday, Joel Quenneville was behind the Florida Panthers bench as usual, coaching his unbeaten National Hockey League team to a 4-1 victory over their Eastern Conference rival Boston Bruins at FLA Live Arena in Sunrise. The Panthers have started the 2021-22 campaign 7-0.

Also yesterday, Kyle Beach, a former NHL hopeful who now plays pro hockey in Germany, revealed in a televised interview that he is the “John Doe” at the center of a recently completed investigation into a sexual-assault allegation involving the NHL’s Chicago Blackhawks in May of 2010.

By the end of today, Quenneville might be out of his head-coaching job. Two fellow Blackhawks higher-ups who were still with the team are now gone. One resigned; the other was fired.

During the 2009-10 season, Quenneville was head coach of the Blackhawks, who were en route to a Stanley Cup championship, and Beach was a so-called Black Ace – a 20-year-old Blackhawks minor leaguer who’d been added to the NHL roster as insurance in the event of an injury.

Though the Blackhawks took him with the 11th overall pick in the 2008 NHL draft, Beach never played a single minute in an official NHL game.

But while with the Blackhawks, he informed team officials that the team’s video coach, Brad Aldrich, then 27, had sexually assaulted him during the second week of May 2010.

This past spring, Beach sued the Blackhawks, and the team hired a law firm to undertake an independent investigation. On Tuesday, the firm, Jenner & Block, published its findings.

The 107-page report presents Aldrich’s and John Doe’s versions of events in graphic detail, noting where they differed and including statements from others who knew of the encounter. Aldrich maintained that the sexual encounter was consensual. Doe claimed Aldrich threatened to short-circuit his career if he did not comply.

The parties in the lawsuit, presumably, will sort that out.

But when it came to Blackhawks management, Quenneville included, the report is unequivocal and seemingly damning.

The Jenner & Block investigators concluded that having learned of the allegations, the Blackhawks’ management brain trust resolved to…do nothing until the season ended, in order to avoid distractions and “negative publicity.”

Though the team’s own protocol dictated that its human resources department should undertake an investigation, business proceeded as usual. Shortly after the Blackhawks prevailed over the Philadelphia Flyers to win the Stanley Cup, Aldrich allegedly propositioned a 22-year-old Blackhawks intern, who rebuffed his advance.

The Blackhawks told Aldrich he could either resign with a severance payment or be subjected to an investigation. He took the money, and his name was duly engraved on the Stanley Cup trophy. He went on to serve in paid and unpaid positions with USA Hockey, the University of Notre Dame, Miami University in Ohio, and Houghton High School in Houghton, Michigan. While in Houghton, in 2013, he was arrested and pled guilty to fourth-degree criminal sexual conduct involving a minor.

Following the release of the Jenner & Block report on Wednesday, two high-ranking Blackhawks officials who were with the team in 2010 departed: General manager Stan Bowman resigned; senior director of hockey operations Al MacIsaac was fired. According to NHL.com, the league fined the team $2 million for flubbing the investigation – what league commissioner Gary Bettman called “inadequate internal procedures and insufficient and untimely response in the handling of matters.”

Quenneville, meanwhile, has had very little to say about the incident.

Chicago fired him in 2018 after a decade with the team, and Florida signed him to a six-year contract the following year. After last night’s game against the Bruins, Quenneville did not meet with the media as is customary.

In July, after the Jenner & Block was announced, the 63-year-old head coach gave the Associated Press a statement in which he asserted, “I first learned of these allegations through the media earlier this summer. I have contacted the Blackhawks organization to let them know I will support and participate in the independent review. Out of respect for all those involved, I won’t comment further while this matter is before the courts.”

Quenneville was reportedly scheduled to meet with Bettman to discuss the matter today in New York.

Former Blackhawks assistant general manager Kevin Cheveldayoff, who was also involved in the fallout from the allegations, is now GM of the NHL’s Winnipeg Jets. He too is set to meet with Bettman.

NHL.com quoted Bettman as saying he intends to”reserve judgment on [the] next steps, if any, with respect to” Quenneville and Cheveldayoff until after he meets with them.

During yesterday’s interview on Canada-based TSN (The Sports Network), Beach was asked about the aftermath of the alleged assault, seeing Aldrich celebrating with the Stanley Cup trophy.

“The only way I could describe it was that I felt sick, I felt sick to my stomach…,” he said. “[T]o see him paraded around lifting the Cup, at the parade, at the team pictures, at celebrations, it made me feel like nothing. It made me feel like I didn’t exist. It made me feel like, that I wasn’t important and – it made me feel like he was in the right and I was wrong. And that’s also what [Blackhawks’ mental skills coach and team counselor Jim Gary] ‘Doc’ Gary told me – that it was my fault because I put myself in that situation. And the combination of these and him being paraded around, then letting him take the Stanley Cup to a high school with kids after they knew what had happened. There’re not words to describe it…there really isn’t.”