"There are only 32 of these jobs."

That's what you hear about coaches and GMs all the time. Does a situation feel impossible? Sure. But they gotta take the impossible job, because there are only 32 of them!

But we saw the flip side of that over the past few days, with Dallas Eakins and Brad Larsen being let go by their respective teams. They were both brought in during ongoing rebuilds. The idea was to power out of those rebuilds, help the kids get their feet under them, and become competitive in some way. There's no disputing this. Eakins just wrapped his fourth and final season behind the bench in Anaheim, picking up the pieces left by Randy Carlyle at a time when Ryan Getzlaf, at 34, was still the best skater on the team, and the next-closest guys were Jakob Silfverberg and Rickard Rakell