{"id":148135,"date":"2025-08-04T16:29:09","date_gmt":"2025-08-04T16:29:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/148135\/"},"modified":"2025-08-04T16:29:09","modified_gmt":"2025-08-04T16:29:09","slug":"capitals-hire-derek-king-as-ahl-head-coach","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/148135\/","title":{"rendered":"Capitals Hire Derek King As AHL Head Coach"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Washington Capitals have appointed<\/a> Derek King<\/a> as the Hershey Bears head coach. He will become the 29th head coach in franchise history, taking over the role from Todd Nelson<\/a> who was promoted to an assistant coach role with the Pittsburgh Penguins<\/a> earlier this summer. This will mark King\u2019s first head coach role since the 2021-22 season.<\/p>\n

King has deep roots in professional hockey. He was once a top prospect of his own, drafted 13th-overall in the 1985 NHL Draft by the New York Islanders after a junior career rife with high scoring and even higher penalty minutes. King turned pro two seasons later, and quickly shed the role of bruiser to step up as a high-end utility man. He scored 12 goals and 36 points in 55 games of his rookie season. He reached the 40-point mark in each of the next three seasons, building up to a true breakout campaign in 1991-92, when King scored a career-high 40 goals and 78 points in 80 games. It was his first time appearing in more than 70 games in a single season.<\/p>\n

King surpassed 30 goals in each of the next two seasons, then began a gradual decline in scoring following a move to the Hartford Whalers at the age of 29. He was productive through his final years, including netting 52 points in 81 games of the 1998-99 season \u2013 his last full year in the NHL.<\/p>\n

With NHL totals dwindling, King was assigned to the minor leagues in the 1999-2000 season, where he quickly returned to the heights of team-leading scoring. His proficiency, and veteran experience, were enough to earn a player-coach title for the AHL\u2019s Grand Rapids Griffins in the 2002-03 and 2003-04 seasons.<\/p>\n

That role kicked off King\u2019s coaching career, though he wouldn\u2019t take on a full-time coaching role until he joined the Toronto Marlies as an assistant in 2009. He stayed in that role until a promotion to associate coach in 2014. He opted to move to the OHL\u2019s Owen Sound Attack one year later, then returned to the AHL in an assistant role with the Rockford IceHogs in 2016. King was promoted to the role of interim head coach when Jeremy Colliton<\/a> was promoted to Blackhawks head coach in the 2018-19 season. He then superseded Colliton for the NHL role in 2021, stepping up as Chicago\u2019s interim head coach through 70 games and setting a 27-33-10 record.<\/p>\n

The Blackhawks would hire Luke Richardson<\/a> to fill the head coach role full-time in 2022, but kept King as an assistant coach through last season. He\u2019ll now return to the minors once more to man the bench of a club that\u2019s won the Calder Cup in two of the last three seasons. King previously joined the Marlies to a Calder Cup Finals loss in 2012, but didn\u2019t manage much success in transformative years with Rockford and Chicago. His move to Hershey will bring the club a heap of veteran experience, and could solidify King\u2019s claim for an NHL head coach role should he lead the club to their usual success.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Washington Capitals have appointed Derek King as the Hershey Bears head coach. He will become the 29th…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":148136,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5114],"tags":[401,191,11096,5,4,405,190,109,5222],"class_list":{"0":"post-148135","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-washington-capitals","8":"tag-ahl","9":"tag-capitals","10":"tag-derek-king","11":"tag-hockey","12":"tag-nhl","13":"tag-transactions","14":"tag-washington","15":"tag-washington-capitals","16":"tag-washingtoncapitals"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nhl\/114971447365901392","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148135","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=148135"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148135\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/148136"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=148135"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=148135"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=148135"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}