"Guy's a dick": Ex-Flames player Stajan wasn’t a Bob Hartley fan

While all the talk at this time surrounds Darryl Sutter, he wasn’t the only Calgary Flames head coach who ruffled feathers during his time behind the bench.

Former Flame Matt Stajan recently sat down for an interview with the Barn Burner Podcast, where he discussed plenty from his former playing days in what was a three-part series. One of the more interesting topics that came up was regarding Hartley, who coached Stajan and the Flames for four years from 2012 to 2016. The 39-year-old explained that it seemed as if Hartley wanted to divide the dressing room in Calgary.

“I remember being in the dressing room, and we hashed it out one day as players. The room was divided,” Stajan explained. “[Hartley] had said something in a meeting during video. He attacked six or seven of the bottom-six guys, bottom [defencemen], and we came in and I was like ‘that can’t happen, our teams divided. He can’t treat this half of the room one way, and the other half another way’. I said it to Bob, too, but Bob didn’t listen to players.

“Everybody started realizing what he was doing. And this is right after we had success the year before. We made the playoffs, we were a good group. Once you could start seeing a little divide, we had that meeting and were like ‘we can all hate the coach, we all gotta stay together’. Once we had that hash out in our dressing room, all the guys he was treating well started seeing how he was treating everyone else. Then you really start to see that this guy’s a dick.”

Stajan did credit Hartley for making that Flames group believe they could win, but said that near the end of his tenure, players started seeing through his act. He also mentioned that the 62-year-old was much friendlier out in the open to the media than he was behind closed doors.

Though Hartley only led the Flames to the playoffs once in his four seasons with them, he won the Jack Adams in 2015 after leading them to a 45-30-7 record. He was fired after the following season, however, and hasn’t been behind an NHL bench since.

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