Behind the Bench: Inside the Minds of Hockey's Greatest Coaches
256
Behind the Bench: Inside the Minds of Hockey's Greatest Coaches
256eBook
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781633198630 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Triumph Books |
| Publication date: | 10/01/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 22 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Dan Bylsma
Game 7 of the 2009 Stanley Cup Final
It's 10:45 am on a rainy spring day in Pennsylvania and I'm nervous. Part of it is because I'm sitting in a 2007 black Town and Country minivan with a giant crack stretching the entirety of the windshield, parked in front of a house in an upscale neighborhood about 15 minutes north of downtown Pittsburgh. I'm sure I'm being judged by everyone driving by.
I'm early to meet former Pittsburgh Penguins coach Dan Bylsma at his house, so my solution is to drive to a more modest section of the subdivision and wait. I feel like I look suspicious. I'm waiting for a knock on the window at any moment from a neighbor wondering what in the world I'm doing parked there.
I'm also nervous because I realize I haven't perfected my plan for the day. Bylsma has graciously agreed to sit down and watch one of the best playoff games in recent NHL history — Game 7 of the 2009 Stanley Cup Final between the Penguins and the Detroit Red Wings. He's the first coach on my list, mostly because he has the time to do it. He's between jobs and I know that won't last. We're going to spend a few hours reliving the game that launched him from a virtual unknown to a Stanley Cup champion.
He offered to get a DVD of the game from the Penguins and I turned him down because he was doing enough just allowing me to visit his home — I didn't think he needed to do my legwork. At this point, I wish I'd let him.
This meeting came together quickly in April. As one of ESPN's hockey writers, I was approaching our busiest part of the season — the Stanley Cup playoffs. Bylsma, at this exact moment, was between head coaching jobs. I also knew his employment status wouldn't last and my intuition was right. Soon after we wrapped up, he was named the head coach of the Buffalo Sabres.
So I crammed this film session in when I could. Before he got crushed with the demands that come with being a new coach in a new city. Before he changed his mind about helping with the book. In the rush to get it done, I didn't have time to get a hard copy of Game 7 on DVD, kind of an important part of the process.
The solution to the DVD problem was to download a digital copy of Game 7 from iTunes onto my laptop at an investment of $3.99. On the way to Pittsburgh, we — my wife, three kids, and a 14-year-old golden retriever, all accompanying me on the road trip because it was spring break for the kids — stopped by my sister's house to grab her AppleTV, and that was that. (Later, I'd discover just how lucky I was. Not a single other game I needed for this book was on iTunes. It was just completely random luck that this one was.)
Now, minutes away from sitting down with Bylsma, the worst-case scenarios are running through my mind. What if he doesn't have a wireless network? What if his TV doesn't have an HDMI port? How does AppleTV even work?
It was closing in on 11:00 am, our predetermined meeting time. I started the minivan up, thankfully without drawing any attention from the neighbors, and turned the corner to Dan's house.
It's a beautiful brick colonial, newer construction, but nothing that screams a millionaire NHL coach lives there. If anything, it's a house with a modesty that reflects the coach living inside.
Any apprehension about the meeting evaporates almost immediately when Dan answers the door. He's wearing a tracksuit, and if he had skates and a whistle, he could jump on the ice for practice.
It's his golden retriever puppy, Dutchess, who truly breaks the ice and eases my nerves. She seemed to sense my own golden and was immediately on my side, jumping up for a greeting.
"How old is she?" I ask, walking through the front door.
"Just over a year. She gets excited when new people come over," Dan answers, then turns his attention to Dutchess. "Dutchess, down. Come on."
Bylsma turns his attention momentarily away from the dog, her tail wagging. "Would you like a cup of coffee? I'm having one." I accept the offer and try to casually throw out the question that is going to make or break the entire afternoon.
"You have wireless, right?"
"Yeah. I'll get the password."
And we're off.
I start connecting the laptop wirelessly to his big screen, hoping he doesn't mind I've switched the plug of his television from one wall to another to get everything to fit.
He takes a phone call and I realize that he may be in between coaching jobs, but a coach never stops coaching.
"If they make the long pass, it's a mistake," he says during the phone conversation. "It's a mistake for them. It's a 2-on-1 or 1-on-1." I start wondering if every coach talks like this during phone conversations.
Bylsma is a great coach because of his attention to detail. You can hear it just from listening to one end of one random phone call.
It's an attention to detail that came from maximizing every ounce of talent he had just to make the NHL as a player. To stay there, he had to be willing to learn details about the game those who had more skill didn't need to master.
Along the way, he took exhaustive notes, writing down coaching styles and drills that worked or didn't work in pages he added to a three-ringed binder. They are journals with entries that span years and which he still references.
"He wasn't going to outskate somebody," said Tom Fitzgerald when we chatted on the phone a few days earlier. Fitzgerald, who played 17 seasons in the NHL, was one of the assistant coaches on Bylsma's Cup-winning staff in Pittsburgh. "He needed stick position, foot position, angles — that's what Dan was all about. Those are the things he believes that hockey players have and more importantly demand that they play with detail."
Bylsma wraps up the phone call just about the time I miraculously get Game 7 to flicker up onto the flat screen in his living room. The only slight hiccup is a screensaver that keeps popping on when the game is paused, a screensaver composed entirely of photos from my sister's family vacations. I hope he doesn't mind seeing my niece and nephew at Disney World.
I'm sitting on a large couch, with my laptop set up on a stuffed ottoman in front of me. Dan sets down a large cup of coffee next to the laptop and settles into a seat to my left. Dutchess, much to her disappointment, is gated in the kitchen behind us.
Behind Dan's chair is a small table along the wall with a large copy of The Art of War.
I cut the family vacation screensaver short and begin the broadcast on the screen in front of us.
The voice of NBC's Doc Emrick kicks in, a voice that would accompany the entire visit:
"No change in either lineup for Game 7 from Game 6. What will be tonight's lasting memory? Game 7s have long memories. The Red Wings are 11 — 1 on home ice this year, 20 — 3 the last two playoff years. Trying to be the first to win in back-to-back years since they did it themselves in '97 and '98."
"Were you nervous?" I ask as the intro to the game kicks in and Doc rattles off reminders of just how good the Red Wings have been in Joe Louis Arena during this era.
"I wouldn't use the word 'nervous' at all," Bylsma says. "There's a certain amount of angst. It's Game 7, someone is going to win a Stanley Cup. We got down 2 — 0 in the series, we got punted in Game 5, we scratched out the win in Game 6. We had a chance to win the Stanley Cup in Game 7. There was a lot of talk about how it can't be done, you can't beat the Red Wings at home."
Detroit had one of the last powerhouse rosters of the salary cap era, in part because the Wings added Marian Hossa on the cheap to an already great team. They had Henrik Zetterberg and Pavel Datsyuk in their prime. Nicklas Lidstrom, the best defenseman of his generation, playing half the game. Chris Osgood, who knew how to win the big game, in goal.
And it was Mike Babcock, a coach with a Stanley Cup ring won the previous season against these Penguins, against ... Dan Bylsma, some guy who was coaching in the AHL five months earlier.
Shots of both coaches flash on the screen.
By no means does Bylsma look old now but it's stunning to see this version of him on the screen — young, inexperienced behind the Penguins bench. He's wearing a suit, a paisley tie, and a white dress shirt. His arms are folded and he's pacing slightly back and forth.
Then it cuts to Babcock — his thick head of hair, eyebrows pushed down in intense resolution.
"You really look younger there," I say.
Bylsma laughs.
"I wasn't blessed with Mike's hair."
Because his team wins this game, because he coached Sidney Crosby and was the star of HBO's Winter Classic documentary and soon established himself as one of the game's best coaches, it's easy to forget how meteoric Bylsma's rise to this moment was.
He only had 25 regular season games as an NHL head coach on his résumé before the Penguins' playoff run, although his record in those 25 games was an impressive 18–3–4.
Bylsma was as an AHL head coach for all of 54 games.
Dan's older brother Greg was also working his way up his own organizational ladder, this one at Herman Miller, a Michigan-based furniture maker. Even as the successful big brother, Greg had gotten used to being referred to as "Dan Bylsma's brother." That happens when a sibling makes it into the NHL.
In February of 2009, Greg was promoted to CFO of Herman Miller. It's a big deal, running finances for a company that had revenue of $1.6 billion in 2011. He finally had a moment that eclipsed the accomplishments of his little brother.
"I called him up, having lived in the shadow all those years, and said, 'I think I finally beat you. I'm finally ahead of you,'" Greg said. "Three days later, he goes, 'Guess where I'm coaching tonight?'"
Penguins GM Ray Shero had fired Michel Therrien and promoted Bylsma to head coach to get the Penguins into the playoffs.
"I had a pretty good run for three days," Greg says with a laugh. "All of a sudden he's coaching the team that Herb Brooks coached."
And on the screen in front of us, he's 60 minutes of action away from winning a Stanley Cup. The hockey world might not have given the Penguins a chance but the guys on the bench in front of Bylsma believed. He'd instilled that belief months ago.
*
The Red Wings and Penguins are feeling things out against each other in the first period of Game 7 and our conversation shifts to leadership and exactly how he empowered a group of players sitting outside of the playoffs into the one playing for a Stanley Cup in front of us.
Bylsma is the youngest of the four Bylsma boys, so to understand his personality and leadership style, you first have to go to the backyard of his childhood home. It was the battleground for whatever sport was in season. It also wasn't a democracy.
Scott is the oldest of the brothers and with that came power. He decided what was going to be played unless he could be convinced otherwise.
"I could say, 'We're going to play football' or 'We're going to do this.' Danny was the youngest — he couldn't say that," Scott said. "He had to get older people to see his direction or see what he wanted to do in a different way than I did as the oldest."
In Scott's eyes, leadership is the ability to get people to do the hard things necessary to be successful in such a way that they might not even realize they're working hard. It's convincing them to do things they might not otherwise want to do by convincing them they're having fun.
"That's the real secret of a leader," he said.
I share Scott's leadership theory with Dan and he gets it immediately. One of his philosophies in life is that he simply doesn't do things unless he enjoys them. That philosophy carries over to the way he runs a team.
You see it in the way his teams practice — at a high pace but always fun. Bylsma is usually right in the middle of it, throwing a shoulder into a player as he skates by or holding a shootout contest at the end of practice as players stand at center ice and cheer.
"I'm not a huge fan of the words 'hard work.' Hard work to me is eight hours of shoveling stones or digging a ditch. That's hard work. Getting after it playing hockey, practicing — even that to me is an enjoyable thing," Bylsma says. "I want to create an environment and an atmosphere where people want to work and want to learn and want to get better, improve, and grow. I want to do that for the team as well."
I thought of Bylsma's comment later while standing just outside the visitors' dressing room at Scottrade Center in St. Louis next to former Penguins forward Matt Cooke. He'd just wrapped up an extended practice for the Minnesota Wild during a playoff series against the Blues. At this point in his career, he was a guy who was in and out of the lineup on the fourth line.
On Pittsburgh's championship team, he was part of a line with Tyler Kennedy and Jordan Staal that was critical to the Penguins' success. They wouldn't have won the Cup without that trio.
We were leaning against a wall in the hallway when we began to talk about Bylsma and that great Penguins team. His immediate smile confirmed the connection was still there.
"Dan didn't come in and demand things. He didn't come in and scrap everything," Cooke said, sweat still beading on his face. "More than anything, he supported the group that was there. We came up with a list — I don't know if Dan mentioned this. I don't know if I should say it."
"If you don't want to say it, it's got to be good. C'mon, say it."
"It was called the Woody List."
Cooke explained.
"It was doing things that excited your teammates. Taking a hit to make a play. A big save. A clear on the penalty kill. A faceoff won at a key time in the game. Obviously a big goal. Any of those things that are immeasurable to teams that everybody on the bench sees — it creates momentum. It jacks everybody up. It supports your teammates. We didn't have that at the time. I think that once the team recognized it, that those things matter to wins and losses, that it matters this much to each guy on the team, it brought a respect level that wasn't there." The Woody List.
"Who came up with the phrase?" I asked.
"Dan. Ask him what it means."
We wrapped up the chat and I pulled out my phone to text Bylsma.
"Can't believe you failed to mention the Woody List," I type into my phone. I mean, we only sat in his living room for four hours.
"I didn't tell you everything," he shot back. "It only seemed like it."
I laughed. But there's some genius in the Woody List, because on that list are the most miserable aspects of winning hockey games. Nobody wants to step in front of a shot coming in at 100 miles per hour or expose themselves to the big hit along the boards to keep the puck in the offensive zone a moment longer.
What the Woody List did was celebrate those who did and encourage others who might not normally participate in the harder parts of the game to do so.
When that Penguins team was clicking, everybody was making those contributions that don't show up later in the box score.
"That's the true sign of the team, and understanding that and knowing however you're going to contribute, it's going to have an impact," said Penguins captain and superstar Sidney Crosby. "The best example of that is guys like Petr Sykora and Miro Satan blocking shots. Syky broke his foot. Guys got out of their comfort zone to win games."
*
On the screen in Bylsma's living room, NBC analyst Pierre McGuire is standing next to Red Wings coach Mike Babcock for an in-game interview.
Our conversation shifts to Babcock. It's at this point that I learn about the journals Bylsma kept throughout his career, the ones that detailed drills and techniques Dan's coaches used in practice — good and bad.
The NHL coaches who impacted Bylsma most were Andy Murray, his coach when he played with the Los Angeles Kings, and Babcock, for whom he played in Anaheim. From Babcock, Bylsma learned how to clearly spell out and articulate the foundation of a team.
With my eyes on the screen, I steer the conversation toward the team battling the Red Wings.
"What was the foundation of this Penguins team?" Bylsma stands up from his chair. "Push pause for a second." I reach toward my laptop and a moment later the screen freezes. In a minute the family photos screensaver will appear on the TV.
Dan leaves the room, looks in his office for a moment, and then disappears into the dining room.
His voice echoes from the other room: "I hid everything since you were coming over."
A moment later, he sits on the couch next to me holding a binder with a USA Hockey logo on it. Bylsma was the coach of the American Olympic team that finished fourth in the 2014 games in Sochi, Russia.
In this binder was the foundation of that team. The identity.
He opens to a page and I see the words "Who We Are" in all caps and underlined. Below that are six phrases, each with bullet points under them.
Bylsma starts reading.
"Fast. Aggressive. Smart. Patient. Smothering. Great defensively."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Behind the Bench"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Craig Custance.
Excerpted by permission of Triumph Books LLC.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Foreword by Sidney Crosby,
Preface,
1. Dan Bylsma,
2. Ron Wilson,
3. Mike Babcock,
4. Bob Hartley,
5. Todd McLellan,
6. Mike Sullivan and John Tortorella,
7. Joel Quenneville,
8. Ken Hitchcock,
9. Claude Julien,
Epilogue,
Acknowledgments,
About the Author,