An old school Zoom session with Flyers-bred coaches
No NHL hockey for almost a month. No clear indication of when the season, or perhaps next season, will resume or commence.
It’s one big waiting game, but if you’ve been around long enough, you know how to handle it.
“You always try to find the positives in things going on,” Carolina Hurricanes head coach and former Flyers strongman Rod Brind’Amour said Friday. “Right now it’s that family time that you just never get during the year. That’s kind of what we’re taking advantage of right now.”
Brind’Amour took advantage of his down time on this Friday afternoon to spend some time in the Zoom world with a couple of old teammates and long-time friends, Craig Berube and Rick Tocchet.
Three rather iconic Flyers on an NHL video conference together, trying not to be overly serious, but also exhibiting some of the traits that carried them from overachieving players to leaders of teams and ultimately to champions.
Brind’Amour, who won a 2006 Stanley Cup championship as a Hurricanes captain, is in Raleigh with wife Amy and their 8-year-old son. But he’s had time to frequently connect there with his three older children from his first marriage, now all in college.
“I don’t get to see them too much,” Brind’Amour said, “so we’re spending time there.”
Berube, the former Flyers enforcer-turned-head coach who didn’t play with Brind’Amour until returning to the Flyers for a second tenure, said he’s also taking advantage of family time in a busy New Hope, Bucks County home. He has three kids there, his girlfriend has two. Three of the five are
11-year-olds. That can cause a problem for a guy like Berube, whose studies were usually limited to strategy on ice.
“There is quite a bit of schooling here that we do with them,” said Berube, the assistant who took over for fired Mike Yeo (now a Flyers assistant) in St. Louis during the 201819 season and somehow led the Blues to an unlikely Stanley Cup championship. “That’s a little bit frustrating for me, I’m not going to lie to you. I’m having a difficult time with it, to be honest with you. But it’s something I don’t get to do every day and it’s a little bit different. I’m enjoying myself, for sure.”
With the NHL season and the world at large at a virtual standstill amid a scary coronavirus shutdown, even three hardboiled, old hockey guys are finding the time to enjoy the kind of family atmosphere they all said they had as youthful players in Philadelphia.
“I always wanted to be in the game,” said Tocchet,
the young fighter with the choppy skating style who turned himself into an NHL star with the Flyers, and who took both the rookie Berube and a few years later a young Brind’Amour under his wing. “As a player as you go through playing and dissecting your game. You always look at the other team, too, and think, ‘How do you beat this team?’ You try to partake in coaches meetings, devising game plans.
“That was a big thing for me when I was done. I wanted to stay in the game. I’m not a management guy so I thought maybe coaching was the next best thing to being a player.”
He cut his coaching teeth with Colorado and Arizona, got a shot as a head coach in Tampa, which before long let him go in an ownership change. But after a successful spin as an assistant in Pittsburgh, Tocchet is getting another shot as head coach in Arizona and is making a difference with a team that for years was in the dregs.
He also knows they have a long way to go.
But Tocchet said he’s long on practical experience in such a situation. He reaches back to the years that Mike Keenan developed him and other young players into a team that didn’t win a Cup in two near-misses in the 1980s, but won the respect of the hockey world. That was especially so when they pushed a team full of future Hall of Famers from Edmonton to the limit in 1987.
“That is a big part of the fabric that I’m using to try to coach now, try to instill in our players,” Tocchet said of that longago Flyers team. “I’m not sure there was a harder working team that I’ve ever been on. We always pushed each other. Wayne Gretzky is a good buddy of mine and he always says, ‘That was one of the hardest working teams I’ve ever played against.’”
For a guy with as much energy as Tocchet, who on Thursday celebrated birthday No. 56 (yikes), a shutdown during a pandemic doesn’t mean long stretches of boredom.
While both Berube and Brind’Amour said they and their respective St.
Louis and Carolina colleagues have switched into “offseason” mode, working with scouts and management on draft preparations, etc., Tocchet isn’t of a mind to be too far down the road as yet.
During the shutdown he’s frequently commuted from his Arizona home to visit his girlfriend in Las Vegas, noting he socially distances himself by staying in the car for those 3-plus hour drives. But he’s also keeping close tabs with his players and says he frequently reminds them that there’s always something they can do to stay sharp.
“I still believe we’re going to play in the next couple of months, so I try to be optimistic,” Tocchet said. For that reason, he thinks it’s extra important for his players to find a way to stay in game shape ... even if the fitness centers near their homes are closed up tight.
“There really is no excuse for guys not to be ready,” Tocchet said in looking ahead to an NHL re-start. “I was talking to some players and (told them), ‘Where there’s a will, there’s a way.’ I’m a big believer on working on your game. If you’re a guy that’s an average shot you should be shooting pucks every day. I remember – old school – my dad used to put this parachute in our garage. I used to shoot a ton of pucks at it. I think you can do that sort of stuff ... hockey specific stuff.
“You have time, more than ever. There’s no distractions. There’s no, ‘Hey we’re going on a trip, hey let’s go eat, hey let’s go play golf.’ There’s no excuses, no distractions.”
There’s also no looking ahead right now in this period of limbo. That’s why three opposing head coaches with close ties that were broken but never lost along the way could revel in a nearly hour-long Zoom session together.
“A lot of our coaching is from the gut, from feel,” Berube said. “I played for a long time, and we all have, so you do have experience in those areas.”