99

by Wayne Gretzky

  Vyacheslav Kozlov wasn’t as big as Fedorov or Fetisov, but you don’t have to be huge to play hockey. He was a goal scorer. He had great hand-eye coordination and an above-average shot. Kozlov’s car was hit by a bus in 1991 while he was going to a practice in Russia. He suffered brain damage, but made a miraculous recovery. Kozlov would end up playing until he was forty-three—1,182 NHL games, 853 points.

  Vladimir Konstantinov was drafted in the eleventh round. He was a very tough guy, among the most physical Russian players ever. Anyone who thinks Russians are soft should have been paying more attention to Vlad. Konstantinov never scored a lot of goals, but he was probably one of the best defensive defensemen. His teammates would feed him the puck and he’d shoot through the middle and create a lot of scoring chances. He loved the contact and would play a really hard-nosed game.

  Viacheslav Fetisov was regarded as the best defenseman who ever played in the Russian system. I mean, no one can compare to Bobby Orr, but Fetisov liked to carry the puck and had been an exceptional skater in his youth. When he was twenty, around 1978, he was one of the best in the world. Detroit got him when he was thirty-seven. He wasn’t the skater he’d been in his twenties, but he could still skate out of trouble, and if he saw daylight, he was gone.

  There’s been some controversy lately because Fetisov is on the Kontinental Hockey League (KHL) board of directors in Russia and he’s talking about keeping the most talented players in the country until they turn twenty-nine. That doesn’t surprise me, and I’ll tell you why. I know Fetisov pretty well, and there are a couple things he loves in life, and one of them was playing in the NHL. The other thing about Slava is that he’s a very proud Russian. There were opportunities for him to leave illegally, but he wouldn’t do it—he wanted to do it properly. He wanted to be able to go play in the NHL and still say, “I’m Russian and Russia is my home.”

  Now that he’s part of the KHL, which is the top professional league in Europe and Asia, he wants to develop kids who’ll play in and expand the league. Fetisov wants to make Russia what North America is. I don’t think that’s hypocritical. I think what he’s trying to say to them is, “I want you to go play in the NHL, but I want you to brand our country first and build our league first.” And in some ways I agree with him. Russia is losing so many good players at a young age that the sport of hockey isn’t growing as much as it used to there. And it costs a lot of money to develop players. So they’re putting a ton of resources into developing these kids only to have them leave as soon as they get good. And more importantly, he wants those young players to take pride in the system that groomed them. There was a time when no one could touch the Russians. He wants to build that pride back into the system.

  Now, will Fetisov be able to pull it off? I don’t know, but I give him full marks because I know he’s speaking from his heart and that he wants those kids to stay for the right reasons. No question in my mind.

  • • •

  Of course, Detroit also had Stevie Yzerman and Kris Draper. They were really strong at center ice. And they had such big, strong forwards—Darren McCarty, Marty Lapointe, and of course Brendan Shanahan. For a good, skilled team, they were also very tough. After Bob Probert left, they didn’t dress an enforcer—and Probert was a lot more than an enforcer, since he could play the game and put the puck in the net. Detroit was ahead of its time by building a team around high-end skill guys who knew how to handle themselves.

  Ask anyone on Detroit’s Cup-winning teams of 1996–97 and 1997–98 whether it was the Russians who won those two Cups for Detroit, and he’ll tell you, “It was the Red Wings.”

  That’s one thing that every good team has in common—everyone has a role. What really made them winners was the way they came together. They were the United Nations of hockey. They had Tomas Sandstrom, Tomas Holmstrom, and Anders Eriksson from Sweden, and Mathieu Dandenault and Martin Lapointe, who were French Canadian. They were all really proud of their cultures—cultures that the team showed a real interest in. During those years, certain guys like Stevie and Mike Vernon would step up and buy dinner for everyone on the road, and they all had to show up. And once, on a road trip to L.A., the Russians took the team to a great Russian restaurant. The entire team ate together, drank together, and hung together. They really got to know each other.

  They also once played paintball, with the Europeans and French-speaking guys against the English-speaking North Americans, and they just had a riot. Those are the types of things that helped unify the players. At the team dinner after they captured their first Cup, Steve Yzerman said in his speech that one of the reasons they won was the way they stuck together.

  That sort of thing doesn’t happen by accident. That takes the kind of leadership that a guy like Steve provides. But the thing those Montreal and Detroit teams had in common was Scotty Bowman.

  • • •

  Coaching is a unique part of hockey. It’s different from coaching baseball or football in that when hockey teams struggle or experience lulls in the season, players start questioning the coach more than they do in other sports. Does he know what he’s doing? Is he practicing us too hard? Are we using the right systems?

  When things go off the rails, all pro athletes in a team environment will start looking to save themselves: “Hey, it’s not my fault.” But a coach like Scotty Bowman will keep the emphasis on the player, never allowing him to deflect responsibility onto others. And because Scotty wouldn’t tolerate crutches or excuses, he minimized distractions.

  His teams would stay in nice hotels and had as good a travel schedule as possible. He drilled into his players that every decision they made had to be for the team. Individuals were important, they could win trophies, but the number-one goal for everyone was to win as a team. When you’ve got a guy like Bowman, the team stays strong because players don’t dispute or revolt. The ship is never rudderless.

  I didn’t always agree with every coach I played for, but I respected what he was trying to accomplish. I understood that if I followed whatever direction he was taking the team, it would be easier for everyone else to hop on board. I might sometimes debate the coach, talk to him about it, but ultimately I went along. My focus as a player was on one thing only—getting myself ready to play. I had to be the best I could be every night.

  When I started coaching the Phoenix Coyotes in August 2005, I found it to be a completely different experience from playing. Coaches have to get twenty guys ready and on the same page. I loved it, I truly did. I knew that financially we couldn’t afford the caliber of players other teams had, and that we’d be a young team. Winning was going to be tough.

  At first I’d tell my players, “You need to play with your instincts more.” I assumed that they all understood the game as well as I did, but I should have taken into account the number of years I’d studied the game. It didn’t take long to realize that, like everything else, instincts have to be developed and taught. So I put more structure into the details. I might say, “You can’t go below the top of the circles on your forecheck,” whereas early on I might have been looser about it and said something like, “Hey, when you come up and pressure that guy make sure you force him to one side or the other.” Most players need parameters.

  Listen, we’re hockey players and professional athletes. We all have egos. The biggest challenge for me was that most guys thought they should be starting on the power play and doing the penalty killing and playing twenty-two minutes a game. Which is actually a good thing, as far as it goes, because as a professional athlete you need to believe in yourself.

  I discovered that I wasn’t only coaching games. I was managing people’s lives. Some guys you have to build up and maybe coddle a bit, while other guys you have to bring into your office and get on them.

  I knew Viktor Tikhonov’s son, Vasily, really well. I coached Vasily’s own son, also named Viktor, on the Coyotes. You wouldn’t even know young Viktor was from Ru
ssia, or that his grandfather was one of the most terrifying coaches in the history of the game. Viktor is a really outgoing, nice, and fun young man, very North American. He grew up in San Jose, where his dad was the Sharks’ assistant coach. Vasily was a very, very intelligent hockey man and very concerned for his son. When I had Viktor in Phoenix, Vasily would come down to the locker room and talk to me, and that was okay. I had concerned mothers calling me too. I understand that. I’m a father. Parents like to hear what’s going on right from the horse’s mouth: “Okay, what can my son do? How can he be better? How’s he doing?”

  And we had such a young team. Adam Kostis—who played for the East Bridgton Academy Wolverines in Maine and was the son of Peter Kostis, a famous golf coach and a friend of mine—was a pretty good goalie. I saw Peter at a game once and I said, “I’m going to give Curtis Joseph the day off tomorrow. Why don’t you bring Adam and he can play goal at practice?” The next day, when the kid got on the ice, I blew the whistle and said, “You go down to that net.”

  And Adam said, “Well, I gotta stretch.”

  “Stretch? You’re seventeen! Get in the net!” I’m old school.

  Later we were doing breakaways, and a guy came down and shot it hard, hitting Adam high in the upper chest. I blew the whistle and said, “Hey, listen you guys. This kid is seventeen years old—take it easy on him. Just take it easy.”

  Eddie Jovanovski looked at me and said, “Well, Gretz, the kid who just shot on him is eighteen.”

  • • •

  Glen Sather was a big believer in families being around. He didn’t have many rules, but one was that everyone had to bring a date to the team Christmas party. He didn’t want eight single guys sitting at a table only to have everyone leave before dinner ended. Half the guys would bring their mothers. I took my mom and so did Kevin Lowe.

  Now, would Glen Sather have taken those calls from concerned parents? I don’t think so, but hockey has changed a lot since the 1980s, and Glen did really like the family scenario. We’d be in Toronto getting on the team bus at Maple Leaf Gardens with Mr. and Mrs. Coffey and my mom. That just wasn’t done in the hockey world at that time. If we were in playoffs in Calgary, I’d walk out for the morning skate and my dad would be standing there. Glen would fly him out because he always felt that I played better with my dad in the arena.

  Glen reached out to all the dads—including Jack Coffey, Bill McSorley, and Doug Messier. Now teams organize father trips and mother trips, but there were times in the 1980s when, if we were struggling in playoffs, he’d let your family get on the plane. He was really good about that stuff, way ahead of his time. When I coached I learned from that. If a player came to me and said, “Hey, my wife’s going to Vancouver, can she fly on the charter?” I’d agree to it, and even encouraged it. Allowing only the team on the plane is dinosaur thinking. I always felt that if the players are happy, they play better.

  • • •

  Managing your players on the bench is just as hard. I’d coached only a couple of games when the ref came over, staring at the roster sheet. He looked as if he didn’t want to say anything, and I wasn’t sure what was going to happen next. Finally he blurted out, “Hey, umm, there’s a player missing here.” It was one of our young guys, Freddy Sjostrom. We’d had a couple guys coming up and down, and I’d forgotten to put his name on the sheet. Freddy had to leave the bench.

  Coaches like Glen Sather and Scotty Bowman and Joel Quenneville and Darryl Sutter win so much because of great bench sense. They get the right players on the ice at the right time. More often than not, that means your better players, but when your better players aren’t working, a great bench coach can tap into the next group of guys and get the most out of them too. He can give the lineup a shake when the team is flat. He can add some grit if that’s what’s called for, and he knows who has the best chance to win a faceoff.

  The guys on the ice win or lose the game, there is no way around that. But by determining who is on the ice, and guiding what they do, a coach can have a huge effect on the outcome of a game. In the 1976 finals, the Canadiens were up against Philadelphia, the defending champions who had just won consecutive Cups in ’74 and ’75. The Flyers’ top line—Bobby Clarke, Bill Barber, and Reggie Leach—had played the whole regular season together. They allowed only twenty-eight goals against, at even strength all year. Bobby Clarke led the league in plus/minus at eighty-three, Barber was second at seventy-four, and Leach and Montreal’s Steve Shutt were tied for third at seventy-three. At the time, there wasn’t another line in the NHL that could match up. The Philly line would eat any other line for lunch.

  Bowman designed four lines to neutralize them. He started with his usual checking line—Doug Jarvis, Bob Gainey, and Jim Roberts. But he didn’t want to just play defense. He wanted to give that big Philly line something to worry about. So he used his scoring line—Peter Mahovlich, Lafleur, and Shutt—and then added another line that could do both—either Yvon Lambert or Rick Chartraw as grinding checker, Yvan Cournoyer, an offensive threat, and Jacques Lemaire, a great forechecker and playmaker. His fourth line was young and aggressive—Doug Risebrough, Mario Tremblay, and either Murray Wilson or Yvon Lambert. And it worked.

  For the next two years the Canadiens faced the Boston Bruins, and those ’77 and ’78 finals saw some of the toughest games ever played. From 1946 to 1987, Montreal won eighteen straight playoff series against Boston. They had a bitter rivalry and have played each other more than any other two teams.

  In 1970, when he was coaching the St. Louis Blues, Scotty had lost to the Bruins in the Stanley Cup final. At the time, the Blues and Bruins weren’t in the same class. Boston had Orr, Esposito, Bucyk, McKenzie, Hodge, and Stanfield—six guys with more than twenty goals. As an expansion team, St. Louis didn’t have the wherewithal to play any kind of offensive game against guys like that. So they countered with a close-checking shutdown defense and the unheard-of strategy of shadowing Bobby Orr, even though he was on the blue line. They lost, but losing to Bobby Orr doesn’t make you a bad coach or a bad team.

  By 1977, however, the Big Bad Bruins didn’t have Bobby Orr anymore. (The Bobby Orr era came to an end when Number 4 went to Chicago as a free agent. But he played only twenty-six games over the course of three seasons as a result of the pain from his deteriorating knees.) Boston did have Brad Park, though, one of the best defensemen ever. He could skate the puck, he could pass it, and he was no fun to play against. (Win or lose, after a series against the Bruins, a star like Guy Lafleur would be pretty banged up.) Boston relied on their players’ toughness. Coach Don Cherry’s roster, dubbed The Lunch Pail Gang, included guys like Terry O’Reilly, John Wensink, and Stan Jonathan. Jonathan, a Mohawk, stood at just 5’7”, but pound for pound, he was one of the toughest players ever. He could throw punches from either his left or his right. To this day, almost forty years later, Don still shows clips of his fights on “Coach’s Corner.”

  Montreal never had many guys looking for fights, but Scotty would use the other team’s positives to make his own guys feel more competitive. He’d talk about how aggressive the Bruins were, how they could get on guys and turn the puck over. Or he’d tell them that they needed to forecheck like Philadelphia. Larry Robinson said that praising the other teams hurt their feelings—and made them try harder. But unlike when Montreal played Philadelphia in 1976, when they went up against Boston in ’77 and ’78, Scotty matched up his players with the Bruins individually. Doug Jarvis and Bob Gainey were used in defensive roles. They played against Jean Ratelle, who was a very underrated offensive clutch player. Jacques Lemaire centered Steve Shutt and Lafleur, and they became a really strong, dominating two-way line. Montreal had a real edge on defense with three all-stars, Savard, Robinson, and Lapointe. The only defensive team that was maybe better was the first Canada Cup team in 1976, which included the Montreal guys along with Denis Potvin and Bobby Orr and Philadelphia’s Jim Watson. Imagine having all of
them on the same team.

  • • •

  The last Cup of the second Canadiens dynasty, the 1979 finals, was played against the New York Rangers, who were a miracle team. The Rangers beat out the Flyers in the quarterfinals, which was a big upset and a little controversial. They then defeated the Islanders, who’d finished first overall, in the semifinals. The Rangers had come in fifth overall. But they had Fred Shero, a great coach.

  The Rangers had signed Shero—who’d won Cups in Philly in ’74 and ’75 and coached them to the ’76 final against the Canadiens—at the start of the 1978–79 season. But because he still had a year left on his contract, the Rangers were worried about tampering charges, and so handed over their first-round draft pick to the Flyers.

  (That pick turned out to be a guy who’d eventually play with us on the Oilers and become one of my best friends, Kenny Linseman. Kenny was the agitators’ agitator in the NHL. He could really get under people’s skin. He would slash and hack and just yap at you all night. Why do teams dress agitators? Because they help you win. Guys hate agitators so much that they get off their game, and they get sucked into taking stupid penalties. The truly great agitators can also put the puck in the net—nothing drives a team crazier than watching the guy who has been chirping at you all night bury a clutch goal. Kenny had over 800 career points.)

  Now, the Rangers were supposedly under a curse. (They won the Cup in 1939–40, and the mortgage to Madison Square Garden was paid off shortly after. To mark that dual occasion, the Rangers president, General John Reed Kilpatrick, burned the mortgage papers in the bowl of the Cup, and they hadn’t won since.) So in 1979, the Rangers were on a mission. They also had a good team. They’d signed Bobby Hull’s WHA linemates Ulf Nilsson and Anders Hedberg, and they had Phil Esposito as well as a bunch of young guys—Ron Greschner, Dave and Don Maloney, Don Murdoch, Ron Duguay, and Mike McEwen. In short, they had three scoring lines and a mobile defense. But their goalie, John Davidson, was their key player (and is now president of hockey operations for the Columbus Blue Jackets). John, who was a big guy and covered a lot of net, was having a tremendous playoff season. He stood on his head game after game, even though he had injured his knee in the semifinals against the Islanders.