Crisp agrees.

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Dany Heatley apparently isn't a fan of coach Cory Clouston, who took away some of his prime ice time, and now he wants out of Ottawa. Eventually, he will get his wish.

Photograph by : Ottawa Citizen

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"Once a general manager starts having dinner with a player, the coach is dead in the water. You can only dodge the bullet for so long before it's going to hit you between the eyes."

After being fired by the Tampa Bay Lightning last season, former coach Barry Melrose said he couldn't do his job without interference from above. He was deemed to be too hard on star centre Vincent Lecavalier and rookie Steve Stamkos.

"I was hired to coach, and I coached," he said. "I wasn't playing the right guys. I was playing certain guys too much, I wasn't playing other guys enough. Every day was a constant battle. Finally, the guys in charge decided they wanted to coach and they got rid of me. That's what it comes down to."

Coaches generally understand that stars will always be allowed to stray from the team concept, both because of their name and their potential to make a fantastic play from nothing.

"All the players know that there are certain players who can have more freedom, for sure," said a current Western Conference coach. "If you're a third-line plumber, no, you don't have that luxury. The role players know they have to accept that. The coach has to gauge all of that and not let it get out of hand. That stuff can become so detrimental to team play. You can't constantly be making turnovers, trying to go through three or four guys yourself. That stuff hurts the team, it's stuff that can't be allowed to happen. You have to hold the (top guys) as accountable as possible."

Clouston did precisely that when he replaced Hartsburg. The end goal is always to motivate the stars to accept that they aren't larger than the team, to show them that everyone benefits in the long run. The coach can't control a player's salary, but he can dictate his ice time.

If the star player doesn't adopt new habits or whines about being asked to do what everyone else is doing, a team faces a dilemma, according to the Western Conference coach.

"It becomes an organizational decision," he said. "Can we win the Stanley Cup with this guy and his personality? The coach and the general manager work together, they're all well-informed and they talk about how to handle those guys. If they're given so much freedom and too much rope, it just doesn't work."

The former NHL coach says Heatley has become a classic case of a player wanting out because his ego has been bruised for not being placed in situations where he could be the star attraction.

"Clouston was using Heatley as the fourth, fifth, sixth shooter in the shootout and on the second power-play unit," he said, referring to the fact that Heatley is a career 3-for-19 since the shootout was put in after the lockout. "Star players evaluate their games on ice time. It's not necessarily how many minutes, it's the quality of those minutes. If you're on the second power play, you might only get on the ice for 30 seconds."