With one brush of his newly recovered powers Thursday, general manager Paul Holmgren did more to unify the Whalers than anybody in recent team history.

Holmgren fired coach Pierre McGuire after six months.

It was more than a great idea.

It was justice.

In 15 years of covering the NHL, we had never seen a coach so universally disrespected and disliked within his own organization.

McGuire fancied himself two parts Scotty Bowman and one part Bob Johnson. It turned out to be a superhuman leap of faith on his part.

At 32, McGuire was the youngest head coach in the NHL. He never had been a head coach at any level. And it showed. He is book smart and X's and O's smart, but often not people smart.

When a young man is so headstrong, so emotional, so calculating, such a control freak, so full of ambition and so full of himself, he will either rocket to the top or crash.

Maybe McGuire will rebound. Maybe Quebec will hire him as head coach or Bowman will make him an assistant in Detroit. It is difficult to believe McGuire, who has one year and about $200,000 left on his contract, can remain with the Whalers in any official capacity.

It also is quite evident McGuire's joint Bowman-Johnson modus operandi was in itself problematic. Bowman's instincts are to be cold, calculating, sometimes dictatorial. Johnson was optimistic, shepherding, encouraging. McGuire tried to be simultaneously distant and close to his players. It didn't work.

In a blistering post-mortem, captain Pat Verbeek called McGuire's firing the best thing that could have happened to the Whalers. He said other teams mocked their coach. He said his own teammates had no respect for McGuire. He said a number of players wouldn't have wanted to play in Hartford anymore.

Is Verbeek telling the truth?

It sure looks that way.

Every player and every non-skating member of the Whalers does not have the financial luxury or the courage to speak on the record as Verbeek and Sean Burke have. But in the past six weeks, we spoke to no fewer than 20 people --from all areas of the organization. The support for McGuire was almost nonexistent. It turns out that it wasn't only the players. It was almost everybody. And once owner Richard Gordon was convinced of the facts, McGuire was out.

We said he was headstrong.

McGuire has insisted that if he had pulled a few different strings during the Buffalo nightclub mess -- such as making it clear about a disputed curfew -- there would have been no problems. But Verbeek and Holmgren say the Buffalo affair merely was the cap on a bubbling bottle of discontent.

In a May 3 meeting with Holmgren, it was made clear to McGuire that he must talk to a number of players to clear up obvious problems. But in two weeks, McGuire spoke only to Sean Burke.

We said McGuire was overemotional.

When the hallway curtain opened after a loss in Boston, McGuire was found by the media wildly smashing sticks against the wall. When the door opened after a loss in Pittsburgh, McGuire was seen knocking furniture around the coach's room.

We said he was full of himself.

Many times he privately said after a game how he outcoached the other guy. But it was something never really made public until May 3, when McGuire proclaimed that no coach in the NHL "can outwit me." That quote ran in The Hockey News and raised eyebrows all over the NHL.

His fascination with trying to outwit the other coach may hurt the Whalers in the long run. Instead of playing kids such as Robert Petrovicky or Kevin Smyth long after it was apparent the team was out of the playoff race, McGuire would fastidiously match lines, go with aging veterans and make sure certain faceoff alignments were always followed. Instead of development, he seemed just to want to squeeze out two points.

Once when he was an assistant coach, McGuire bragged about his strategy to shut down Mario Lemieux. This was after a 7-3 loss and four goals by Kevin Stevens.

On the bench, players said McGuire would taunt the other team, saying he couldn't believe the opposing coach was allowing him certain line matchups. This braggadocio led Pittsburgh's Jaromir Jagr to mock McGuire in December. McGuire got Jagr for an illegal stick, and after Jagr jumped out of the penalty box, he scored on a breakaway. Although he had scored big goals in two Stanley Cup championships, Jagr called this overtime goal the biggest of his life because he humbled "that know-it-all."

We said McGuire is calculating and lost the respect of his team.

Consider the Michael Nylander situation. McGuire would throw his arm around the young Swede and tell him he loved him like a son. He told him they would lead the Whalers to great heights. But after a humiliating 9-2 loss in Montreal -- a humiliation that should have shared by 20 players -- McGuire embarrassed Nylander by insisting he be sent to Springfield. Then McGuire told some people, including Gordon, that four or five players were tired of Nylander not playing defense and were prepared to beat him up if he weren't demoted. There's no truth to that, Burke and Verbeek said.

On April 15, it looked as if Holmgren, who had gone to the Betty Ford Center, would be out as GM. There was talk Bowman might be lured to Hartford as some sort of management Svengali for McGuire. But Holmgren staged perhaps the greatest comeback in Whalers history.

Our biggest second-guess of Holmgren now is why he stepped aside and hired McGuire as coach in the first place on Nov. 16.

Our conclusion is that Holmgren did it for self-preservation. Gordon had initially wanted to make McGuire GM when Brian Burke left to work for the NHL. If Holmgren hadn't pushed McGuire, an assistant GM at the time, into the coaching spot, McGuire might be GM and coach today. Holmgren might have been fired by Jan. 1.

Gordon allowed Holmgren to serve justice Thursday. Now, he must learn to stay away from becoming too close to the daily hockey operations and the coach. This is not to say he should shrivel up and leave. The owner should deal with the GM. The owner should worry about the purse strings. But the coach should not be calling the owner every night like McGuire did. It's not healthy for the coach to be telling the owner how he outcoached Ed Johnston or Brian Sutter. It also isn't smart.