Dave King happily returns to KHL
Veteran NHL coach and mentor returns to Yaroslavl Lokomotiv
Dave King sits in his apartment in Yaroslavl, Russia, watching a KHL game on TV between Torpedo and Dynamo Minsk, and he’s in seventh heaven.
“I understand some of the hockey terminology, but when they start going off on how the media guys are, I get lost,” chuckled King, who just arrived to coach Yaroslavl Lokomotiv for the second time in as many years, replacing former Swiss Olympic team coach Sean Simpson, who was abruptly gassed eight games into his first season there.
King, 66, had a nice job as a coaching adviser in the desert, working for Arizona Coyotes, but it took him about five seconds to say “da” when asked if he’d return to Yaroslavl after stunningly getting the rebuilt Lokomotiv team past powerhouse Moscow Dynamo and SKA St. Petersburg, featuring superstar Ilya Kovalchuk, in the playoffs last spring.
“I hope somebody wants me at that age,” Coyotes GM Don Maloney said.
King, who was the first Canadian to coach in Russia — nine years ago in the steel town of Magnitogorsk, where Iron Mike Keenan now works as he tries to repeat as KHL champion — wasn’t ready for semi-retirement as an adviser in Phoenix.
He’d been a hero to the Lokomotiv fans last spring, when he also left a Coyotes management job, with Yaroslavl having to win their last four league games just to make the playoffs.
They stunned league-leaders Dynamo Moscow, losing the first two games then winning four of the next five in the playoffs., then knocked off SKA, who finished the season third overall in seasonal points.
When the Canadian-born Simpson, who replaced Ralph Krueger as Swiss national team coach after the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver, was fired in September, King rushed back.
“I seem to be the fix there. When they called, I packed up and was on the first plane from Phoenix to Russia about five or six hours later,” said King.
He’s fully cognizant how much hockey still means to Yaroslavl, a little more than three years since the plane crash that ago that wiped out the team, which included former NHLers Pavol Demitra, Josef Vasicek, Karlis Skrastins and Karel Rachunek, and coach Brad McCrimmon.
“That tragedy really affected that city,” King said. “There’s a huge monument in front of the rink to honour the players, and pictures of all the players on both sides of building and another monument to them inside the arena.
“This city’s really wrapped around that, and last spring, our playoff run made people happy about hockey again. We have a soccer and a basketball team in Yaroslavl, but hockey’s No. 1.”
King, head coach of the 1984, 1988 and 1992 Canadian Olympic squad, served in the NHL as head coach of the Calgary Flames and the Columbus Blue Jackets and as an assistant with the Montreal Canadiens.
He also travelled to coach in Hamburg, in Malmo, Sweden and went to Magnitogorsk (coaching Evgeni Malkin) in 2005-06, and the Globe and Mail’s Eric Duhatschek penned a fine book on his time there.
“There was a fascination for me to know more about Russian hockey back then, to get behind the scenes in Magnitogorsk and to do it again in Yaroslavl was just too interesting for me,” said King, a member of both the IIHF Hall of Fame and the Order of Canada.
“They have high expectations for Canadian coaches in Russia … do things the Canadian way. We think the Canada-Russia rivalry is great on that side of the table; it’s just as big over here. I know Sochi left a real sour taste in their mouths.”
King has a few very good young players on Lokomotiv, including defencemen Nikita Cherepanov and Vladislav Gavrikov, who will be playing for Russia at the World Junior Hockey Championship in Montreal and Toronto over Christmas. They could be first- or second-round NHL picks in 2015.