Dean Evason, in Prague in May as an assistant coach with Team Canada at the World Championship, had just gotten done with dinner and was strolling around Old Town Square with his wife, three kids and mom when Evason’s son, Bryce, pointed: “Dad, there’s Billy.”
Evason hadn’t seen Bill Guerin since November, when the Minnesota Wild general manager called him into his office and fired him as coach. Yet there Guerin was, sitting on a patio with Mike Sullivan, the Penguins’ coach and the man Guerin has picked to coach the United States in the 2025 4 Nations Face-Off and 2026 Winter Olympics.
What are the chances? As Evason crept up, he overheard Guerin explaining to Sullivan why he let Evason go.
As loud as can be, Evason surprised Guerin by yelling, “Well, if you didn’t fire your f—ing coach, you probably would have made the playoffs!”
Guerin, hysterically laughing, stood up and gave Evason a bear hug, then came out to the street to say hello to Evason’s family.
Evason’s mom, at first, was standoffish. Guerin asked Sheila for a hug. Sarcastically, she said, “Just this one time,” before punching Guerin, let’s just say, way, way … way down low.
Wild fans who watched Evason for six seasons — parts of five as head coach — now know who Evason gets his fire from.
Columbus Blue Jackets fans, a loyal bunch who keep filling up Nationwide Arena despite years of losing, will learn the same soon.
Evason’s .639 points percentage in Minnesota is the best of the seven coaches in franchise history. On Thursday night, in — of all places — Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul, Evason’s tenure as Blue Jackets coach will officially begin.
“When coaches go back to play a team after they get fired and they say that it means nothing to them, that makes absolutely no sense,” Evason said during a phone conversation with The Athletic. “Now, I don’t want to win that hockey game any more or any less than I want to win the sixth game of the season. But is there more emotion? Is there more excitement? Is there more passion because you were in that spot and you got let go from there?
“I mean, of course there is.”
To show you how much respect Guerin has for Evason, he persistently pumped Evason’s tires when Don Waddell, the longtime Thrashers and Hurricanes GM in his first year in Columbus, was going through the hiring process.
“We know we all have shelf lives. Coaches’ are probably shorter than GMs’,” Waddell told The Athletic. “Billy’s a friend of mine and I don’t think Billy’s going to steer me wrong. Billy felt bad about firing Dean, but he felt he had to make the move at that time.”
Guerin laughed at the fact Evason’s first game with Columbus is in Minnesota.
“It’s right up Deano’s alley,” Guerin said. “Trust me, I want to beat him, too. He’s beaten me in more rounds of golf than I care to share, so I want to take him down.
“Hey, look, I know in the days leading up to firing Dean, I kept saying he was safe. I guess I just never really admitted it to myself that it was in the back of my head. Unfortunately, this happens all the time where players kind of are out of answers. And it’s not the coach’s fault. It’s not the players’ fault. It’s usually just time.
“But it’s the most difficult decision I’ve had to make. Dean’s a friend, and he’s a hell of a coach, and he had a big hand in really changing things for the positive around here. I think he’s perfect for a young team like Columbus. From the outside looking in, I think his messaging is perfect for that. The team takes on the personality of the coach, and that’s a really good thing for Columbus.”
If ever a team needed a steady hand, it’s this one.
It was the early evening on Aug. 29 when Evason found out Blue Jackets star Johnny Gaudreau had been killed along with his brother, Matthew, in New Jersey.
Evason, in Colorado for a concert at Red Rocks, was in a hotel room watching TV with one of his daughters when Waddell called.
“He said Johnny got in an accident,” Evason said. “I said, ‘He’ll be OK, right?’ And Donnie said, ‘No.’”
Evason, shocked, almost dropped the phone. His eyes welled up in the moment, as he thought back to sitting down with the always-happy, always-smiling, always-full-of-life Gaudreau just a few weeks earlier.
After being hired, as Evason began the process of calling his new players, there was one he wanted to meet with face to face: Johnny Hockey.
Evason called Gaudreau and said, “I’d like to fly to Philadelphia and have lunch with you.”
Gaudreau loved the idea.
Every morning at 10 a.m., Gaudreau would skate with his dad, Guy, at a rink in New Jersey. Gaudreau gave Evason a date, a time and the name of a restaurant they could meet at near the rink.
Evason was to fly in, then fly out later in the day.
“It was supposed to be a lunch and a quick chat,” Evason said. “And we ended up sitting there for two hours, talking about the team, about him, his family. We talked about everything, just getting a feel of who he was, who I am. I left there and had a fantastic feeling about moving forward with him as our star player.”
“And that,” Evason said, his voice breaking, “is the only time I spoke to him.”
Gaudreau’s influence is actually one of the reasons Evason landed the Columbus job in the first place.
When Waddell was hired in Columbus and began going through the process of talking to players to diagnose what had plagued the Blue Jackets, he talked with several of the veterans, from Gaudreau and captain Boone Jenner to Erik Gudbranson and Zach Werenski.
They wanted a coach who would hold them accountable. A coach who would push them and be hard on them but also be fair.
One thing Gaudreau told Waddell stuck in his head.
“I asked Johnny who he thought his best coaches were, and he really spoke highly of Darryl Sutter and Bob Hartley, who obviously coached for me in Atlanta, and I know both guys are pretty hard coaches,” Waddell said. “I asked all the older players who played for multiple coaches the same question, and they all liked that type of coaching style.
“Johnny talked about what we needed to move forward, and being in that locker room every night, the pieces that we needed or were missing and what kind of atmosphere we wanted to try to create. Dean checked every box of what Johnny and the older guys wanted.”
Evason, a former NHLer, has coached since the late 90s. He has experienced it all, but there’s no guidebook on how to navigate the start of a season after the loss of a player, especially one as beloved as Gaudreau.
After the brothers died, the Blue Jackets held a vigil. At that point, Evason hadn’t even met three-quarters of his players in person. As he subsequently flew with the team for the brothers’ funeral, Evason couldn’t stop thinking about Gaudreau and how unfair this was.
He felt so terribly for their family, for their friends.
“I’ll never forget how eerily quiet it was throughout the entire day,” Evason said. “Just beyond emotional.”
But two days later, when the Blue Jackets were back in Columbus, Waddell asked Jenner if they should postpone captain’s skates.
“Boone, who I’m telling you reminds me so much of (Wild captain) Jared Spurgeon the way he treats young players and his teammates, said, ‘No,’” Evason said. “Boone said, ‘It’s important we’re all together at this time.’ So those first couple of skates, it was therapy in some way that they were able to go out there and do what they do.
“There is still a ton of emotion. Like the other day, I talked to a guy off to the side just passing in the room, and there were tears all over the place. It’s very hard. But the guys have stuck together. There’s an incredible closeness with this group.”
The player Evason thinks about the most is Sean Monahan, one of Gaudreau’s best friends who signed a five-year deal with the Blue Jackets this offseason. Their plan was to raise their kids together. Monahan is a quiet guy, but Evason said teammates are making sure he’s well-supported.
“His backyard looks onto Boone Jenner’s backyard, and it’s a couple of doors down from Johnny and (his wife) Meredith’s home,” Evason said. “They have been able to support each other closely.”
Gaudreau’s No. 13 jersey hangs in a stall next to Monahan’s in the home locker room at Nationwide Arena.
“And when we go on the road, his jersey will be in the stall exactly where Johnny would be on the road,” Evason said. “That stall will always stay his and open and with his jersey on game days.”
Evason would describe his offseason as frustrating.
“Disappointing, I would call it,” he said.
There were several head coach vacancies. He interviewed for many, and even though he seemed tailor-made for teams like the Ottawa Senators, Winnipeg Jets and Seattle Kraken, he didn’t get offered any.
He was offered three assistant or associate jobs, but at this point in his coaching career, he was not ready to go back to that role.
He decided to bet on himself, be patient and wait for another head-coaching gig, this season or beyond.
He was enjoying the time off anyway. His wife, Genevieve, is a flight attendant with Air Canada, and since being let go, he had accompanied her to five or six countries for 24-to-48-hour trips and took a couple more vacations together.
A golf nut, he went to the Masters because for the first time he was unemployed in April. He went to Hilton Head and Phoenix for golf trips with buddies. A lover of theater, he took in some Broadway shows. A sports nut, he went to a Yankees game and the U.S. Open tennis tournament. He visited all three of his kids.
But after Evason turned down the assistant gigs, Waddell left Carolina for Columbus, ultimately fired Pascal Vincent, and suddenly another job was open.
Waddell made clear the one prerequisite was previous head-coaching experience. He talked with several candidates, including Jay Woodcroft, Todd McLellan and Jeff Blashill.
“Every time I talked to Dean, the clear thing that came out was not just the passion to coach, but the passion to coach the Blue Jackets,” Waddell said. “Finally in July, when I brought him in here and he met with the senior people with me making the decision, he was clear-cut the No. 1 choice by everybody once we finished our interview process.”
Waddell began doing due diligence with former Blue Jackets captain and current director of hockey operations Rick Nash, and Nash called a bunch of players who previously played for Evason. One by one Nash got endorsements. Nash was also Team Canada’s GM at the World Championship, so Nash got a real good feel for Evason as a person and as a coach.
Evason was offered the job in late July and jumped at it.
Like the Wild, this is the Blue Jackets’ 24th season. They have made the playoffs only six times, getting past the first round just once.
Excluding the expansion Vegas Golden Knights and Seattle Kraken, the Blue Jackets have the fewest wins (767) and points (1,754) in the league since their 2000 inception and the worst points percentage (.483).
So this won’t be a quick fix, and the Blue Jackets have already suffered more adversity with a serious injury to Jenner in a recent practice.
“Dean and I talked just yesterday about, ‘Nobody’s going to feel sorry for us,’” Waddell said. “We’re not going to make excuses. We’ll go out and play hard every night. Whether we win or lose, every night we’ve got to make sure we play hard and have the team prepared to play the way he wants to play. And he won’t forget that and I won’t forget that.”
Evason likes his team.
Everybody talks about the young players like Adam Fantilli, Kent Johnson, Cole Sillinger, Kirill Marchenko, Yegor Chinakhov and David Jiříček, but Evason thinks highly of the Blue Jackets’ depth, their goaltending and veterans like Werenski, Gudbranson, Sean Kuraly and Monahan.
“Our team is fast, but I think we’ve got a lot of bite with our group as well,” Evason said. “It’s been such a cluster here for the last two, three years with not having a coach, having a coach, having different coaches, managers. So we just need some stability put into place.
“And I think between Don’s group upstairs and a tremendous coaching staff, we’ve got some stability and I think the players like that.”
Evason’s loving living in Columbus, too.
Like St. Paul, where he lived in a condo and walked to and from the arena daily, he bought a condo a few blocks from Nationwide Arena. And one of the perks of the job is membership at nearby Double Eagle Golf Club.
During a recent golf outing with his assistants, including former Wild goalie Niklas Bäckström, Evason was 250 yards from the green and debating whether to lay up. He decided to, then walked toward the ball and ripped himself audibly for not having more courage.
“Backy walks by and goes, ‘Let me guess. We’re going to play two defensemen in overtime, too,’” Evason said, howling.
The Wild have had six 100-point seasons. Two came consecutively with Evason at the helm, and that was amidst the Wild having to spend significantly less than 31 other teams during the first two years of the Zach Parise and Ryan Suter buyout penalties.
“I do feel a lot of pride because what we did there, as far as getting to the playoffs every year,” Evason said. “But you know what we did? We competed every night. We gave ourselves an opportunity every night.
“Yeah, we didn’t have playoff success. We lost in the first round every year, but we competed our butts off. If you played against the Minnesota Wild, you knew that you were in for a hard, physical, tough game.
“You can talk about the cap and whatever, but the players that were there bought into playing hard for each other.”
Evason’s mom and wife will be in Minnesota for his Blue Jackets debut Thursday.
Evason is excited to walk into Xcel Energy Center again.
“I can’t wait to take it all in,” he said. “I absolutely loved my time in Minnesota, and I loved living in Saint Paul, and I loved walking into that building. It’s your home, right? You make it your home.
“It’s the same thing here. I walk to work. I come in a certain way. I walk in. I see the same people. I’m looking forward to seeing the same people walking in there and not taking that right turn into the Wild locker room but continuing down the hall to our locker room. I’m looking forward to embracing all the emotions that are going to come with it, and hopefully the outcome is on the right side of the win-loss column for the Columbus Blue Jackets.”
