Floundering Pens fire coach

Last spring, Michel Therrien guided Pittsburgh to the Stanley Cup finals.

PITTSBURGH (AP) — Michel Therrien, his team fading in the Eastern Conference playoff race less than a year after making the Stanley Cup finals, was fired as the Pittsburgh Penguins’ coach on Sunday night and replaced by minor-league coach Dan Bylsma.

Therrien oversaw one of the NHL’s best single-season turnarounds in his first full season in 2006-07 and coached the Penguins to within two victories of the Stanley Cup last year, but this team has struggled badly since mid-November and is danger of not making the playoffs.

General manager Ray Shero decided to fire Therrien after a 6-2 loss in Toronto on Saturday night in which the Penguins led 2-1 going into the third period.

The Penguins are 27-25-5 after winning 47 games each of the last two seasons and are five points out of the final conference playoff spot. They also are 1-7-1 in their last nine road games.

“I didn’t part like the way, the direction the team was headed,” Shero said on a conference call, not long after giving Therrien the news. “I’ve watched for a number of weeks and, at the end of the day, the direction is not that I wanted to have here. I wasn’t comfortable, and that’s why the change was made.”

Asked how much Toronto’s comeback entered into the decision, Shero said, “It wasn’t so much the outcome, it was how the game was played.”

Bylsma, a former NHL player and assistant coach, takes over the way Therrien did in the middle of the 2005-06 season when he replaced Eddie Olczyk (now NBC’s top hockey analyst) during Sidney Crosby’s rookie season — called up from Wilkes-Barre/Scranton of the AHL.

Bylsma said he’s “not sure what interim means,” but wants the Penguins to get back to utilizing their skill, speed and world-class players Crosby, Evgeni Malkin and goalie Marc-Andre Fleury, and force teams to adjust to them.

Malkin is No. 1 in the NHL scoring race and Crosby, the 2006-07 champion, is third.

Therrien relied on a system in which every player, no matter his skill level offensively, was required to play tight defense, and there were rumblings in the dressing room that the players were no longer buying into the coach’s disciplinarian ways.

“You hear that in pro sports, that the team may have tuned the coach out, or the coach may have lost the team, but I’m not sure if you can pinpoint that,” Shero said. “As the general manager of the team, I’m very close from watching, it’s just a feeling — the timing is right.”

Bylsma did not criticize Therrien, but said it’s clear to him the Penguins need to get back to being a fast, offensive-driven team.

“With the strengths we have, we should be able to go into buildings and make teams deal with the quality of players we have at every position,” Bylsma said. “I look at a group that can win games right now, and we need to do that. We can do this, but the players have to believe we can do this.”

Bylsma, called by Shero minutes before he was to coach an AHL game, won’t even have a morning skate to get acquainted with his new team — the Penguins play at the New York Islanders today at 2 p.m.