CrashingTheGoalie

by Ron Spence

This past season was hard on NHL coaches.  Seven were fired before the playoffs started.

During the 2007-08 campaign, only three were axed – Washington’s Glen Hanlon; Atlanta’s Bob Hartley and Ottawa’s John Paddock.

The good news – in 2008-09 – is that three of the replacements have led their teams into their Conference Finals.

Denis Savard was fired four games into the season – on October 16, 2008 - and Joel Quenneville took over, and coached the Blackhawks in 78 games, winning 45 versus 22 losses and an 11 OTL.

Paul Maurice was hired a month and a half later – on December 3, 2008 – when Peter Laviolette was fired. Maurice coached in 57 games, and the Hurricanes accumulated 33 wins versus 19 losses and 5 OTL.

Michel Therrien was fired two and a half months after Laviolette – on February 15, 2009 – and was replaced by Dan Blysma. Under his guidance, the Penguins went a remarkable 18 wins against 3 losses and 4 OTL – in 25 games.

We wanted to look at these coaches’ styles, to see if they had anything in common.

The consensus was that Quenneville had fun with his players, while working them hard. He was experienced, loose, and treated them like individuals.

“He’s been awesome for us,” defenseman Brent Seabrook said. “He’s done a great job of keeping things loose and letting the players do their own thing. He works us hard and makes sure we take care of ourselves, but he lets us have fun and enjoy ourselves, which is good because we have such a young team.”

“We have a young team, but at the same time our coach has a lot of experience,” said goaltender Nikolai Khabibulin. “Where we lack experience he comes in…Everybody believes so much in what he says that everything goes without question. We kind of stay calm even when we’re losing games.”

“[Quenneville] gets intense on the bench, but in the locker room he never shows his frustration, unlike some coaches I’ve played for. With a young team, that’s really important. When they see that, guys don’t squeeze their sticks when they go out and play. He really tries to keep everybody level. There’s never a panic.”

“Joel, in my opinion, is a great coach,” added Blackhawks president John McDonough. “In Joel, (the players) see somebody that doesn’t panic and who provides great leadership.”

The Carolina press reports little about what the players think – on any topic.

But, based on comments from a former player, and Maurice, himself, we can tell that he treats his players like they are family, while holding them accountable, is loyal and knows how to put a positive spin on things.

“Paul made it feel like family,” said Hal Gill, who had played for Maurice in Toronto. “You were always accountable, and he would let you know if you weren’t cutting it. That was the case one night after I’d had an awful game.

He said: ‘You can’t have another one like that.’

Yet with the media, he went to bat for me. He stuck up for me. As a player, you appreciate that.”

Like Quennville, Maurice remains calm under fire.

“We’ve lost five games in a row [against the Bruins] that’s a fact,” he said. “We’ve got to get through it, there’s no question about it. We’ve got to play a better game against this team.

“I would say there’s a mental barrier there if I had seen a different reaction from our team yesterday. They were exactly the way they were after Game 1 [against New Jersey]. They were a little bit down in terms of knowing they can play better and they can do more and there’s a little anger in there, too.

“So I thought we got the positive emotional response we hoped for from our team. It certainly wasn’t defeatist by any means.”

“We are the underdog here,” coach Paul Maurice continued. “Boston has been dominant all year and certainly played very well against us. We do like that role. We’ll be respectful of the team we’re playing and try to limit them as best we can [but] we like some of the things we learned in that first series, and we’re hopeful we can apply those to this next one.”

And Maurice turns the negative into a positive:

“…I don’t mind our team getting hit. It usually means we have the puck…It’s the nights where the other team doesn’t throw any hits that’s the problem, because they have the puck the whole time.”

Dan Blysma is a great communicator, who breaks the game down and gets his players involved. He has fun with his players, stresses Pittsburgh’s system, and like Quenneville and Maurice, has a calm demenour.

“He communicates well with everybody whether it be a serious matter or a joking matter,” Sidney Crosby said. “In meetings, he keeps everyone on their toes and gets people involved through questions or hearing other guys’ thoughts.”

“He’s a teaching coach,” a player told Dave Molinari of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. ”If something goes wrong, he’s going to teach a guy the right away, as opposed to just kicking and screaming and yelling at him and not have a guy know what’s going on.”

“There’s just a different attitude in the room [since Bylsma was hired],”  another player said. “It had gotten to the point where guys were kind of dragging themselves into practice, dragging themselves to the rink…Guys are more upbeat, having a lot more fun. … I don’t know if it was just [Bylsma], or if it was addition by subtraction. But, for whatever reason, the attitude is different, and that’s translated to a lot more success.”

“Our dressing room is much different right now than it was when I walked in…” Dan Blysma said. “…we had a very attentive group of guys, a hard-working group of guys, a group of guys that to a man, they like to be around. They are willing to be challenged. They are willing to talk about what we need to do and how we need to get better, and, you know, bringing it out on the ice and just in the room today, it’s a confident bunch. It’s a group that believes that we have a good team, good players if we play a certain way. But at the same time, they are also a group that respects the situation, respects the opponent and also knows that we can get a lot better than we were February 15, and even as we played, we know we can still get better and they challenge themselves in that direction.

“There are sometimes things that are out of your control with injuries and different scenarios that can lead into the success or taking away from your team. But I think the strength of our particular team in respect to if we are going to advance is, A, we believe that we should be a team that can contend. We’ve had the experience of being there in the finals and losing, which is a painful experience. And we have a room that believes that if we play a certain way, that if we play a certain style and execute a certain way, that we should be a very difficult team to deal with and that if we do that, we can expect to have success in any given night.

The challenge for us is doing it every night, dictating the pace of the play and where it’s played, and then doing that to our opponent night after night after night. That’s the challenge for this team.“

“Since he’s been here, things have gone well, so maybe he’ll have to deal with a time when things aren’t going so well,” another player told Molinari.

And that’s where A BABCOCK comes in.

If Pittsburgh plays Detroit – during the Stanley Cup finals – things might not “[go] so well,” and that’s when we will see how good a coach Dan Bylsma is.