Kings’ corporate style is loose, like L.A.
Barry Melrose considers his coaching style during a run to the ’93 Stanley Cup
Original publication date: June 7,
1993
Original headline: Kings go with kids — at practice; Players’ children provide the patter of little skates
INGLEWOOD, CALIF. To their burgeoning ranks of celebrity supporters, such as Mick Jagger, Michelle Pfeiffer, John Candy and Magic Johnson, the Los Angeles Kings added one of the all-timers yesterday: Michelangelo.
Or was it Donatello? Tough to tell, although behind that turtle mask and that turtle attitude, the dude looked suspiciously like four-year-old Steven Robitaille.
While 20 minutes away in Santa Monica Canadiens coach Jacques Demers was praising his kids, Barry Melrose was actually letting his kids on the ice.
There were dazzling, whiteblond Ville and Joonas Kurri in home Kings sweaters. Adrian Melrose, 8, smartly turned out in the old purple-and-gold Kings sweater, skating like a pro, while some of the other small fry covered a fair bit of ice in their rubbersoled Nikes.
This is, remember, L.A. One night after sounding a tad childish about the Kings not getting a penalty shot after Guy Carbonneau’s goal-mouth coverup, Melrose opened a daycare.
“I like having the kids on the ice,” Melrose said of his non-traditional approach to Game 4.
“Everyone’s relaxed and the guys like being around them. A lot of coaches don’t like kids around the room or the rink, but this is something I’ve been doing since I was coaching in Adirondack. I want this to be an enjoyable environment. The rink should be a fun place to be. The teams that don’t like coming to the rink, they’re dead.”
“Like, what can we learn now if we practised?” said Kings centreman Pat Conacher, who brought Patrick, an eight-year-old, and his buddy named Mike. “This loosens everyone up, not that we’re a tight team to begin with.
“The playoffs are tough on the kids. These kids and the wives deserve so much credit, not just ours but Montreal’s and the other teams’, too. They go through a lot. It’s tough when you do as much travelling as we do, a game about every second night for two months. The kids know what’s going on, but they want to spend time with us. This helps.”
Of course, there are children around the Montreal Forum, too. Once a year.
The Christmas party. A splendid photo opportunity. Actually, a strapping young Ewen is a regular at practices, and Jonathan Roy comes around, and there have been occasional sightings of Savards and Ramages, but the hallowed corridors are not exactly reverberating with the pitter-patter of tiny feet.
This is the Canadiens’ way. Everything has its place.
When discussing the buttoneddown image of his organization last week, Demers said his players were “young businessmen. That’s how we approach it.”
But the Kings are not the World’s Most Serious Hockey Team, which perhaps comes from their environment — Los Angeles is a great but not necessarily serious place to play hockey — but also from their Energizer Bunny of a coach.
Melrose, who keeps going and going in press sessions, permits an extraordinary degree of freedom for a coach.
Changes in attitude. Changes in latitude.
“Barry’s let everyone be himself,” Conacher said. “The point is to show up (at game time) and be ready to play. A lot of coaches want regular run-of-the mill factory guys. Yes, sir. No, sir. They’re the boss and they want you to be afraid.
“You saw it happen in the mid1980s. They started weeding the characters out of hockey. When I broke in (with the New York Rangers in 1979-80), about half the guys on the team smoked. Now you don’t see anyone doing it. Now I’m not saying that smoking and drinking are good things, but it just seems that so many coaches aren’t willing to let guys be themselves.
“You have so many different personalities flowing together in a team, and guys become scared to say something. But you have to be the man that you are. You aren’t going to win with 25 robots. Think of the great Edmonton teams. They had lots of personalities. I look at the wacky qualities as strengths, not weaknesses.”
The Kings figure they will bounce back tonight from consecutive first-minute losses in overtime, that they won’t turtle when faced with the challenge of stopping a team that has an air of destiny about it.
The turtling was yesterday.
A lot of coaches want regular run-of-the-mill factory guys. Yes, sir. No, sir. They’re the boss and they want you to be afraid.