In 2012, Aldrich took on a role as a volunteer assistant hockey coach at Houghton High School, and he was arrested in October 2013 in a case involving a 16-year-old player. Aldrich pleaded guilty to misdemeanor criminal sexual conduct in December 2013 and was sentenced to nine months in jail. After his release in July 2014, he was required to serve five years of probation and register as a sex offender.

Many of these details came to light in two lawsuits against the Hawks filed in May 2021, the one by Beach and the other by the former Houghton High School player. Other details were revealed in subsequent reporting after Beach’s lawsuit became an international story.

But based on his podcast interview, Quenneville was mostly oblivious to it all at the time.

When asked whether he was “forced” to resign as Florida Panthers coach on Oct. 29, 2021 — two days after then-Hawks general manager and president of hockey operations Stan Bowman “stepped aside” with the release of the Jenner & Block findings — Quenneville said, “It all happened so fast.”

“To be quite honest, I didn’t think I was going to miss one game,” he told Strickland. “That was the first day after I coached the last game. I was on the plane going to see (NHL Commissioner) Gary (Bettman) … (and) on the way there, that was the first day I read the report.

“I think it was the summer of ’21 where I heard anything about sexual abuse or assault, and the day before that last day I coached, Kyle came out (in a televised interview) and said that he had been assaulted. … Where I read the details was on the plane up to New York that day. And I’m sitting there reading it … and it was the first time I heard anything about it and it made me sick to my stomach when I read how our video coach (allegedly) assaulted one of the players.

“Leaving Mr. Bettman’s office that day, we came to an understanding that it would be best for me to step away, and I didn’t anticipate I would be gone this long.”

It has been more than three years in exile. Perhaps Quenneville plans to use this interview as a launching pad for a contrition tour in a bid to get back into the NHL as a coach.

But if you’re trying to show contrition, you can’t dance around the facts.

So we’re to believe that Quenneville was mostly in the dark about the ugly details of Beach’s allegations until he was on the plane to New York in October to receive his reckoning in person from Bettman?

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