Lightning’s Cooper is early coach-of-year candidate
Ex-lawyer takes team to best first half in franchise history — and without Stamkos
NEW YORK — Jon Cooper has yet to coach a full season in the NHL, yet his Tampa Bay team is among the best turnaround stories in the league.
Heading into Wednesday’s action the Lightning sat in third place in the Eastern Conference after finishing last season 28th in the 30-team league.
Tampa Bay put together the best first half in franchise history, securing 54 of a possible 84 points, including 25 wins. And the Lightning kept winning even without Steven Stamkos, perhaps the game’s best pure goal scorer, who has not played since breaking his leg Nov. 11.
“We had a little moment there where we were feeling pity, the whole ‘why us?’ ” Cooper, 46, said last week before Tampa Bay beat the New York Rangers 2-1. “But we’ve got the staff, and my mentality has always been, don’t dwell on the problem, dwell on the solution.”
Articulate and assured, Cooper was something of a mystery when he took over the Lightning in March. Few in the NHL knew much about him other than that he had won championships at every level he coached. He had not played much hockey past the junior level for the Notre Dame Hounds in Saskatchewan. He made more of a mark as a lacrosse player for Hofstra, where he got a business degree before attending law school in Michigan.
After coaching youth hockey and winning high school championships in Lansing, Cooper closed his law practice and in 2003 took over the Texarkana Bandits in the North American Hockey League, which feeds players into colleges. The team played in a tin-roofed fairgrounds building where Cooper, his wife, Jessie, and the team staff assembled the boards and painted the lines.
“It was a real education,” Cooper said last season, before reaching the NHL. “Getting a Suburban, hooking up a trailer, loading the equipment and driving 120 miles one way to practice in Little Rock because that was the closest ice available.”
The Bandits moved to better facilities in St. Louis for 2006-07, and Cooper led them to two consecutive titles. He then turned around the floundering Green Bay Gamblers of the U.S. Hockey League, another junior circuit, and guided them to a title in 2010.
Then Lightning general manager Steve Yzer man hired Cooper to coach Tampa Bay’s American Hockey League affiliate in Norfolk, Va. He guided the Admirals through a North American professional hockey record 28-game winning streak in 2011-12, and then the Calder Cup title. Eight players from that Norfolk team are now on Tampa Bay’s roster, including some rookies who are making an impact: forwards Tyler Johnson, Ondrej Palat and Richard Panik, and defencemen Mark Barberio and Radko Gudas.
“They’ve really developed into bona fide NHLers,” Cooper said. “We’ve grown together.”
After Stamkos was injured, veterans like the captain, Martin St. Louis, “kind of calmed the waters a little bit,” Cooper said.
Still, Cooper planted the seeds for their leap in the standings on the first day of training camp when he began selling his players on committing to better defensive hockey. They surrendered 150 goals in last season’s 48 games. Through 48 games this season, they had allowed 115, tied for fourth best in the league.
“You have to convince your team that when you play defence, it actually leads to offence,” Cooper said. “I always have the saying, ‘I’ve never seen a breakaway start in the offensive end.’ That’s kind of our mantra. You’ve got to get back.”
And Cooper acknowledged that good goaltending could make a coach look like a genius.
“Let’s be honest,” he said, “Ben Bishop’s been outstanding for us. He’s really been at the forefront of why we’ve had success.”
Bishop, 27, is having a breakout season, with a .935 save percentage, 1.93 goals against average and 24 victories entering Thursday’s game in Ottawa (7:30 p.m., RSE, RDS).
Hall of Famer Scotty Bowman, who holds virtually every NHL coaching record, lives in Florida and is a senior adviser for the Chicago Blackhawks. He said he liked the way the Lightning played defence, how deceptively fast they played and the buttons Cooper pushed behind the bench.
“He gets the right guys on at the right time,” Bowman said, perhaps the highest compliment to a coach.
What Bowman and the rest of the hockey world now know about Cooper puts him in the conversation for coach of the year. Calendar Boys: During a recent telecast on NBCSN, Mike Emrick mentioned that more NHL players were born early in calendar years. But he did not get to finish the thought. Emrick was referring to a phenomenon identified by Malcolm Gladwell in his 2008 book, Outliers .Glad well wrote that in youth leagues, players are registered according to birth year. So a child born in, say, January 2005 competes against one born in December 2005 and has the advantages in size and development that almost a full year can confer at a young age. Those advantages compound as time passes, helping players born early in the year and working against those born later. It even affects the distribution of players who reach the NHL.
According to the statistical website QuantHockey.com, the breakdown of current NHL players by birth month continues to reflect the phenomenon. January to March: 263 players; April to June: 245; July to September: 201; October to December: 177. Quant hockey also showed that the correlation holds up for all NHL players going back to the league’s beginning in 1917.