Familiarity among Oilers’ coaches
Connections go back to junior hockey for McLellan’s latest additions on the bench
You can go home again.
Just ask Manny Viveiros, who has a house in St. Albert and has been a vagabond player and coach for 34 years since the Edmonton Oilers drafted him 106th overall in 1984, but was traded along with Marc Habscheid to Minnesota for Gord Sherven some 18 months later.
And now the circle is complete after the Swift Current Broncos coach and director of player personnel, who took his team to the WHL title, has been hired as one of Todd McLellan’s assistant coaches along with Trent Yawney and Glen Gulutzan.
Yawney played in Calgary for five years and Gulutzan coached the Flames for the last two seasons and both grew up in tiny Hudson Bay, Sask., with a population of 1,500.
“Gully and I weren’t in the same classes, but his dad taught my wife and I in elementary school,” said Yawney, bemused at the six degrees of separation in all people.
Viveiros played countless games against Yawney in their junior days as a member of the Prince Albert Raiders. Yawney suited up with the Raiders’ bitter rival Saskatoon Blades. Both were drafted in ’84. Yawney went in the third round (45th overall) to Chicago, while the Oilers took Viveiros in the sixth round.
“Manny was a dynamic offensive player in junior (289 points in his last three seasons), tapeto-tape passes, he got the puck going up ice. He had a real offensive flare and just missed out (with his size) by a few years,” said Yawney.
Viveiros, who spent 12 years playing in Austria as well as Italy and Germany, will handle the Oilers’ dead-last power play with Gulutzan. He will be in the press box for games until the third period when he’ll move to the bench beside Yawney, who will look after the defence and 25thranked penalty kill, the two jobs he had in Anaheim and before that with McLellan in San Jose.
“I grew up watching the Oilers as far back as the WHA days. When I was over in Europe, the first team I’d look for to see the score was the Oilers. So to come back now, it’s pretty ironic. This checks so many boxes for me,” Viveiros said. “I was absolutely awestruck (during his first training camp) out there live with Wayne Gretzky, Mark Messier and Jari Kurri, to see those guys in their prime. They had that No. 77 (Paul Coffey) on the back end. I don’t think I was beating him out on the blue-line.”
Viveiros came back from Europe to Swift Current, replacing Mark Lamb who went to coach Arizona’s farm team. In two years, he became a hot item with other teams sniffing around and also interested in him as an NHL assistant.
Yawney, a head coach in Chicago for two seasons, was McLellan’s assistant for three years in San Jose, but left for the American Hockey League to run the bench in Syracuse and then Norfolk.
“I had an opportunity to be a head coach again and see where that led and here we are again,” said Yawney, who coached Ducks defenceman Hampus Lindholm in Norfolk. “Hampus was 18 with me in Norfolk and I think I saw him play more than my son.”
Yawney worked with Duncan Keith in Chicago. He also worked with Cam Fowler and Josh Manson in Anaheim. He did a good job with all of them. He’s a good teacher.
“I’m excited when you look down the roster of the Edmonton defencemen. There’s some good stuff there,” said Yawney, who coached against the Oilers with the Ducks in the 2017 playoffs. “Maybe a different set of eyes will get them back to where they were not so long ago.”
Yawney and McLellan have known each other since they were teenagers, playing junior in Saskatoon, plus coaching in San Jose, so he’s not coming in cold.
“From the communications standpoint, head coaches get pulled in a lot of different directions and as assistants we hear a bit more from players who are disgruntled and maybe I can take a fly by Todd’s office and say, ‘Hey, you know Matthew Benning doesn’t know if you trust him enough, so maybe you can do a fly-by on the ice and give him a bit of love,” said Yawney.