Laviolette
this latest Laviolette push toward a Stanley Cup, with a young and gifted Predators nucleus, the start of something that will last?
His first three NHL head coaching jobs featured instant turnarounds and immediate success, and all three ended with Laviolette being fired and trashed publicly by the people who sent him on his way. He has a knack for inspiring vitriol.
He also has a claim as the best U. S.born coach in NHL history. He’s the second to win 500 NHL games. He won the Stanley Cup with the Carolina Hurricanes in 2006 and took the Philadelphia Flyers to the Cup Final in 2010, losing to the Chicago Blackhawks.
And if Nashville can beat the Ducks three more times, he will become the fourth coach in NHL history to take three franchises to the Stanley Cup Final. Scotty Bowman, Dick Irvin and Mike Keenan are the others.
That’s elite company. This is a remarkable
career, especially when you consider how it started. And Laviolette, 52, doesn’t just inspire passion in the superiors who turn on him. That’s clear if you ask around enough.
“He never should have been let go by the Carolina Hurricanes — that was a travesty,” said Aaron Ward, a key member of the 2006 Carolina team.
“Just a great person and coach,” said reporter AlanHahn, who covered Laviolette’s two- season stint with the New York Islanders from 2001 to 2003 for Newsday.
“I’ve played for a lot of coaches, and some of them I think are good people and some of them I don’t think are good people at all,” said Mike Commodore, another of Laviolette’s Cup- winning Hurricanes. “Peter’s truly a good guy. That’s the main thing I will always remember and appreciate about Peter Laviolette.”
Bob Luccini has known Laviolette since coaching him at Franklin ( Mass.) High in the 1970s, but he has known the Laviolette family for much longer. He played beer league hockey with Laviolette’s father, Big Pete. Big Pete’s father, Art, owned Art’s Grocery in town.
Big Pete ran that store before getting into the garage door business, and Laviolette had plans to join his father after earning his business degree in 1986 from Westfield ( Mass.) State College. He also played hockey for the school’s Division III program, which struggled to compete.
“They’d be down double digits in some games,” Luccini recalled, “but Peter would still be out there diving in front of slap shots.”
A New England- based Minnesota North Stars scout named Al “Smokey” Cerrone happened to watch Laviolette play as a senior. Cerrone wasn’t there to scout him, but he loved his intensity. That led to an invitation to North Stars camp and a minor league contract with the Indianapolis Checkers.
By 1988, Laviolette was a member of the U. S. Olympic hockey team and saw his lone NHL stint in an 11- year playing career. The final tally was 12 games with the New York Rangers and 594 games with six minor league teams. And it’s often the athletes who have to grind for everything who make the best coaches.
Laviolette was a coaching success from the start, with winning stints in Wheeling, W. Va., and Providence. That’s where he and his wife, Kristen, met. He spent a year as an assistant with the Boston Bruins before Mike Milbury hired him to take over the Islanders.
Both of his teams made the playoffs. But after his second season, Milbury fired him and said, “We were not an inspired group in the end.”
But that set the pattern for Laviolette. He moved on to Carolina and shrewdly put together a 2005- 06 team that was small, fast and built to take advantage of the new rules coming out of the NHL’s 2004- 05 lockout. He motivated and got things out of players they didn’t think possible, which is the essence of coaching.
After firing Laviolette three games into the 2013- 14 season, three years after the coach got the Flyers to the Cup Final, chairman Ed Snider said, “Our training camp, quite frankly, was one of the worst training camps I’ve ever seen.”
Intensity, brutal honesty and winning hockey followed Laviolette to Nashville. Now the Predators are chasing the Cup.