Robbie Ftorek must be a hell of a guy at parties. Does great when he arrives, is charming through the meal and the after-dinner port, but after a couple of hours lounging in the living room chatting up the events of the day with his friends, he suddenly pulls a pig-head out of his duffel bag and starts screaming about the wolverines trying to escape his skull by clawing through his eyeballs.

	Players grew weary of Robbie Ftorek's coaching style, but he was still a winner on the Bruins' bench.

But maybe it isn't his fault. Maybe he's just got so much entertainment in him.

For the second time in his strange coaching career, he has taken a team to the brink of the postseason, only to be fired right before the players tie him to the front bumper and aim the car at the first brick wall they can find.

This time, it was the Boston Bruins, who started fast but are now in a dead limp, safe only because neither Montreal nor the New York Rangers have the gumption to make a run at them. General manager Mike O'Connell got a nose full of the burning cordite in the dressing room and replaced Ftorek with himself.

But as we said, maybe this isn't Ftorek's fault. Maybe his next job (and since we've seen Pat Burns, Mike Keenan and Scotty Bowman rehired hundreds of times, we know there will be one for Ftorek) should come with a closer.

You know, a Trevor Hoffman type, who sits and whittles for 60 games until the players start demanding Ftorek's hollowed-out skull hanging from a tree branch. Someone who can come in and finish out the season.

It's worked in baseball. It's worked, more or less, for Steve Spurrier. It's even worked in basketball, where coaches never weary of saying, "It isn't who starts, it's who finishes."

So why not for Robbie Ftorek? I mean, the guy must have some initial charm, right? He must at least be able to buffalo general managers into seeing his concepts and his schemes for the team whose job he is trying to retire, so he plainly has some value.

So let's start stumping for Ftorek's next job, and the man who will finish it for him.

Say, Harry Neale. Former coach, now a broadcaster (from where most coaches are found these days), could keep the fellows jollied along until the playoffs start, and then they motivate themselves.

Usually.

Or Bowman. He may be done with the long grind of coaching, but has anyone approached him about the short grind?

Or maybe Kevin Constantine. He has succeeded, and has chafed, in two towns now, but maybe a little less of him goes a longer way.

The possibilities here are nearly endless. In an era of specialization in all sports, coaches are still asked to be catch-alls -- tacticians, psychologists, accountants, comedians, prison guards, P.R. men, bassoonists, even mimes when the need arises. (Who can forget Bobby Knight's comedy act of facial contortions not so many years ago?)

This no longer makes sense, though, especially in the NHL, where coaches are fired every 65 minutes for reasons that range from the ridiculous to the ridiculous.

So why would it not behoove owners (who are supposed to be good at behooval) to hire a coach and his replacement at the same time? Saves catering an extra press conference, saves interviewing time, saves contract negotiating time. Packaging the coach's job is an idea whose time has come, damn it, and nobody could use this development more than Robbie Ftorek.

Now in fairness, we've never met the guy, although anecdotally he seems like the kind of guy you like more before you meet him than after. The players seem to respond to his coaching with paricularly felonious fantasies, and as near as we can tell, nobody else in the history of American team sports has been fired twice by a winning team this close to the end of the regular season.

I mean, it would be different if he were running the Florida Panthers, or the Cincinnati Bengals, or Enron. But no, he's been entrusted with two good teams, they remained good while he was the coach, and they still wanted to wire his behind for explosives and leave flaming bags of puppy returns on his porch.

But his skill shouldn't be wasted just because he can be more off-putting than a drunk in church. He can do useful work. He just needs a little help.

So a closer it must be. The time has come for hockey to enter the 21st century, or at least the mid-1980s. It needs Dennis Eckersley in a suit, a gum-snapping Bruce Sutter, a motivational Lee Smith. We would have said Jose Mesa, but since he recently offered to kill Omar Vizquel, that seems a little too close to the Ftorek model.

So give it some thought, fellas. Maybe while the league is on strike and you're watching your arenas sprout cobwebs. Robbie Ftorek can coach for you ... but there's nothing wrong with a little extra depth at the position.

Ray Ratto is a columnist with the San Francisco Chronicle and a regular contributor to ESPN.com