(Hello, this is a feature that will run through the entire season and aims to recap the weekend’s events and boils those events down to one admittedly superficial fact or stupid opinion about each team. Feel free to complain about it.)

One of the big recent trends in hockey over the past few years has been teams in need of coaches going outside the “old boys network” of the 40 or so guys who could reliably get coaching jobs in the NHL.

It used to be that if your team fired a coach, the odds were that it would then hire a guy with plenty of NHL experience, but who had been fired from another team in the somewhat recent past. On some level, this makes perfect sense. You typically only get an NHL job because you are one of the 30 best hockey coaches in the world at any given time. Often, you’d flame out not because you weren’t doing a good job coaching, but because the talent you had to coach in the first place wasn’t conducive to winning.

That’s the thing about NHL hockey: You can be the best coach on the planet, but if you don’t have talented players throughout your roster, you’re not getting very far, if you get anywhere at all.

Case in point was Mike Babcock this past season. He took a Leafs team that was deeply untalented once you got past a small handful of useful players, and he made them competitive in most games because he’s probably the best systems coach in hockey. Lots of one-goal losses, or one-goal-with-an-empty-net for a team that, on paper, was pretty uninspiring.

The fact that the Toronto Maple Leafs went from being a roughly 46 percent adjusted-possession team to north of 50 percent without a big talent injection tells you plenty about Babcock’s quality. The fact that despite the big positive change, the Leafs only went from 68 points under Randy Carlyle and Peter Horachek to 69 under Babcock tells you plenty about the talent level.

So it’s interesting that NHL teams are becoming more into hiring coaches from lower leagues. And it might also be very, very wise. That’s because having the best players is the biggest differentiator between good and bad teams in the NHL, and probably always will be. The fact is, though, that a quality “Xs and Os” bench boss can really get you ahead if you’re a middling talent-level team. That takes you from “decent” to “good,” or from “good” to “great” pretty easily.

But what’s more coaching talent often the biggest reason for team success the farther you get away from the most talented player pools. Systems matter a lot more in college or junior than the ECHL, in the ECHL more than the AHL, and in the AHL more than the NHL. It’s why a coach like Rand Pecknold or Norm Bazin can regularly make the NCAA tournament despite the fact that they’re not getting the boatloads of NHL-drafted players bigger-name schools do. Their coaching acumen and systems are what level the playing field for their older, generally less talented players.

This obviously comes up this week because the Colorado Avalanche hired Jared Bednar late in the week — to go along with “late in the summer” — with the long-time minor-league coach having just won a Calder Cup with Lake Erie. It was his second minor-league title in six seasons as a head coach at lower levels, as he also won a Kelly Cup in the ECHL with South Carolina in 2009.

Certainly, Bednar said all the right things about his approach to the game in his introductory presser, but it’s easy enough to say the right things, and a lot harder to actually win at the NHL level unless you’re an actual good coach. But if his won-lost record in the minors is any indication (89-45-9 in the ECHL, 162-113-33 in the AHL) he very much seems to be.

Again, success at that level is as much coach-dependent as talent-dependent, and the stats suggest that he’s certainly above-average at the very least.

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His teams have finished in the top-9 in their leagues in shots-for percentage across all situations three out of six times, and once more in the top half of the league. In terms of goals-for percentage, they’ve spent four seasons in the top-10 and only one outside the top half. His teams generally seem to get good goaltending (which seems to be very systems-dependent the farther you get from the NHL), because only once have they even finished outside the top-eight in their respective leagues.