BRUSQUE ON BENCH
STANLEY CUP FINAL:
One is engaging, funny and witty. Then there’s the rival coach, Joel Quenneville of the Blackhawks.
It was before the Stanley Cup Final had begun, and three Tampa Bay Lightning players sat at a table in the bowels of Amalie Arena and answered questions for the media. Their session over, the table was moved away and NHL staff, for some reason, set up a podium. Moments later coach Jon Cooper walked into the room and stood behind the podium.
A reporter started to ask a question. Cooper cut him off. Wait a minute, he said. “Did the players get to sit at a table?” Nods and murmurs of assent from the room. Cooper shot a look at a PR staffer that, in no words, conveyed his meaning: You’re making me stand here?
It was a joke. Everyone laughed. It has become something of a tradition. Cooper, 47, in only his second year as an NHL coach, rarely holds a session that doesn’t include a moment of levity. When he isn’t giving long, thoughtful answers to questions, he’s poking fun at someone, or at himself. Even when the dance with the media is a trap — as in the ongoing questions on the health of Ben Bishop — he plays coy, and apologizes for being less than forthcoming. When discussing his players, he’s almost relentlessly positive, and it’s obvious that Cooper has figured out that this stuff trickles down into the locker-room. He’s also aware of what his players are saying, sometimes referencing things even before the comments have been widely reported. It feels like a thoroughly modern approach to the present media culture.
It’s also not how Joel Quenneville does things. The Chicago Blackhawks’ coach approaches the communications part of the job with an attitude most would have about dental surgery: he grits his way through it, using as few words as possible. Occasionally he opens up just a little, but mostly he barks out sentence fragments. The other day, he was asked about the health and availability of defenceman Trevor van Riemsdyk. His response, in full: “Could play.”
The next question was about Bryan Bickell, who had missed games with a mystery illness that might have been vertigo or maybe something else. Quenneville’s full response: “He’s fine. Could play.”
He’s not just brusque about the injury stuff, either. Asked about goaltender Corey Crawford’s shaky Game 3 performance, the 56-year-old coach said: “Just OK.” Quenneville could have added that he still had confidence in his starter, or that he fully expected him to bounce back, but no: “Just OK.”
If Cooper and Quenneville were homicide detectives, there’s no question which one would be the good cop and which one would be the bad cop. But both styles have been very effective at producing victories. Quenneville, a former NHL player from Windsor, Ont., has two Stanley Cups and a Jack Adams Trophy on his shelf, while Cooper, a former lawyer from Prince George, has won titles on three different minor circuits, including the American Hockey League. More interesting still is that their personalities don’t entirely predict the way they coach.
Cooper, the friendly one, understandably has a loyal bunch of players.
“You’re either a guy that pushes buttons, motivates aggressively, or you do it fatherly, I guess,” says Tampa Bay forward Brenden Morrow, who has played for all types in a 15-year career. “He’s kind of the players’ coach. You want to go through the wall for him.”
But being a players’ coach doesn’t mean just letting them play. Jonathan Drouin, the highly skilled 20-year-old forward, has gone weeks between games, raising speculation that there is a rift between the coach and the young star. (Both have denied that.) Cooper has never said what exactly is keeping Drouin on the bench, but the way he has handled the thirdoverall pick from the 2013 draft suggests that trust, in big-game situations, has to be earned. (Cooper did the same thing with Nikita Kucherov in last year’s playoffs; he plays regularly on the top line this season.)
Contrast that with the way Quenneville, the old-school guy, has deployed Teuvo Teravainen, the 20-year-old from Finland. The former world juniors star recorded nine points in 34 regular-season games this year, but he has matched that point total in the playoffs, where he has been in the lineup for 16 of 21 Chicago games. He’s also averaging more ice time per game than he did in the regular season, and has been used on a line with Patrick Kane, and on the power play. For fans used to seeing defence-oriented coaches nail young players to the bench — Randy Carlyle comes to mind — Quenneville is proof that one can be both defensively minded and open-minded. And throughout these playoffs, it has been Quenneville, who you might predict would stick to line combinations that have worked in the past, that has been an inveterate tinkerer — putting Jonathan Toews together with Kane, then splitting them up, and then in Game 4 breaking up Patrick Sharp’s effective third line and putting him with Toews and Brandon Saad.
“It seems like he knows what he’s doing behind the bench,” Kane said earlier in the series.
And that Toews-Sharp-Saad combination? It scored both Chicago goals in Wednesday’s 2-1 victory.