Ovechkin reclamation project under coach Trotz bears fruit
Star goes from me-first reputation to Washington’s team leader
NEW YORK — Barry Trotz had been a free agent for about 30 minutes last summer when the Washington Capitals called and offered him a coaching job.
In the next several hours, he would receive offers from three other teams, so the longtime Nashville Predators coach drew up a list of pros and cons of where he wanted to move.
He considered location, the general manager and what issues each team was facing. Then he looked at the roster.
Washington obviously had Alex Ovechkin. But the question Trotz was wrestling with at the time was whether that was a positive or a negative.
“Sometimes perception is reality,” said Trotz, who admitted that he had miscast the Capitals sniper from afar as a me-first player. “My perception and all that was probably off. When you get to know Alex, he’s a real good player who buys into whatever you’re doing. You just give him a reason why.”
In some ways, Trotz has been the NHL’s Phil Jackson. He’s taken one of the sport’s most dynamic players and instead of stifling him or living with his mistakes, placed him into a structured system that plays to his overall strengths. Ovechkin, who is on his fourth coach in five years, needed that, even if at times he did not realize it.
Since coming into the league in 2005, Ovechkin has burned through every type of coach. He has had a playerfriendly coach (Bruce Boudreau) who let him do whatever he wanted; he had a drill sergeant (Dale Hunter) who essentially turned him into a fourth-line grinder; and he had an in-over-his head rookie (Adam Oates) who converted him into a rightwinger.
Finally, in Trotz, Ovechkin has a coach who is maximizing his skills. The two complement each other.
“I will say that every coach is a different coach,” said Ovechkin. “Every person is a different person. He’s my coach right now and I respect him and he respects us as players.
“It’s not about individual stuff. That’s what he said to me. He told me don’t put pressure on yourself. You have to do little things to have success. And it works.”
Talk to people who have followed the Capitals year after year and they say this season has been different. A lot the faces in the dressing room are the same — 12 players were here when Boudreau was the head coach — but their mindset is different.
You can see it in the playoffs, where the Capitals are stepping outside their comfort zone. In the first round, they combined for 313 hits with the New York Islanders. In the Game 1 win against the New York Rangers on Thursday, even Nicklas Backstrom threw his weight around and surprised Dan Boyle with a questionable bodycheck that led to the game-winner.
“You’ve got to finish checks,” said Backstrom. “There’s not going to be a lot of cute plays in the playoffs.”
Still, this is not like playing for Hunter again, who had Ovechkin blocking shots and nailed to the bench whenever the Capitals had a lead.
Ovechkin, who led the league with 53 goals and is a finalist for the Hart Trophy, is allowed to be creative with the puck. But now his offence is not coming as a result of him not playing defence.
“I just wanted to have a plan to get him the puck,” Trotz said of coaching Ovechkin. “Do what you want to do when you have it, do what I want you to do when you don’t have it, so we can get it back to you. It was really that simple.”
In Game 1 against the Rangers, in which Ovechkin scored a highlight-reel goal on a blistering wrist shot and then set up the game-winner on a behind-the-net pass to Joel Ward a second before the final buzzer, the Washington captain was as good as anyone had seen him. With the puck, he was a scoring threat. Without it, he was a heat-seeking missile darting around the ice in search of his next target.
“We were joking around yesterday that he should have been nominated for the Selke,” said Capitals defenceman Karl Alzner.
Maybe a Selke is still out of the question. But after the game, Trotz praised him for his leadership abilities, likening Ovechkin to Mark Messier.
Did Ovechkin agree with the comparison?
“No. I’m Russian, not Canadian,” he deadpanned, “It’s a huge compliment to me.”