VEGAS JOB TAILOR-MADE
DOWN-AND- OUT COACH GALLANT HAS MADE MOST OF SECOND CHANCE
When George McPhee created a job description for the head coach of the Vegas Golden Knights, he put experience right at the top of the list of required skills. But it wasn’t just any kind of experience that the expansion team’s general manager was after.
McPhee knew he was going to be assembling a team full of players who had essentially been given up on, so he needed someone who had gone through similar struggles. He wasn’t looking for a former Jack Adams Award winner. Instead, he wanted a guy with battle scars and permanent burn marks on his rear end from constantly being on the hot seat. He was looking for someone down on his luck and in need of a second chance.
And he found him, standing on the side of the street, waiting for a cab.
A day after being let go by the Florida Panthers — quite literally, in fact — Gerard Gallant received a call from McPhee asking if he’d be interested in coming to Vegas. McPhee didn’t outright offer the job back then, because at the time hiring a coach was still far down on his list of the priorities, but in McPhee’s mind he had found his man.
“Gerard was kind of the person we wanted, the coach we wanted,” said McPhee. “We took our time but got the man we wanted. What I liked about Gerard as a player is he wasn’t the most talented guy, but he persevered and played the game hard. Perseverance is a great substitute for talent.’’
Describing the Golden Knights’ season as good might be the understatement of the year. The expansion team, which has shattered even the wildest of expectations, entered the allstar break with the most wins and most points in the Western Conference standings. No one expected this. Vegas ranks third in goals- scored, sixth in goalsagainst and has an unreal 19-3-2 record at home.
That they’ve done it with a mostly no- name roster and at times without their No. 1 or No. 2 goalie is a credit to McPhee, who was named the GM of the Year in the mid- season awards released by the Professional Hockey Writers’ Association on Friday. But Gallant, who was given the midseason nod for the Jack Adams Award, deserves just as much praise for squeezing every last ounce of talent out of a group of players that their previous teams had no use for.
“I think Gerard could coach any type of team. I really do,” said Dallas Stars GM Jim Nill. “He makes you part of the team and you’re a valuable part of the team and you want to go to war for him. That’s a great niche to have as a coach.”
Gallant wanted to be a mailman. Well, not really. He didn’t actually want to spend his days delivering the mail or wearing shorts. No, of course not. It’s just that when his teacher asked the class of 16-year-olds to think about what job they aspired to after graduating high school, Gallant figured he couldn’t put professional hockey player. That was silly.
Instead, he picked what he considered a “regular” profession.
“I looked at him and said, ‘ What do you mean you want to be a postman,’” said Doug MacLean, the former NHL coach and GM, laughing at the memory.
“I didn’t know how to answer it, so I said I’ ll be a postman,” said Gallant. “What I wanted to be at that stage in my life was to play hockey.”
Indeed, Gallant is a hockey lifer. As a kid in Summerside, P. E. I., he and his friends used to sweep the stands at the local rink in exchange for extra ice time. As he got older, he worked as an instructor at MacLean’s hockey school. “He was a rink rat,” said MacLean, who has known Gallant since he was 10 years old.
As a player, Gallant was the one taking care of everyone else. He was only 5- foot- 9 and 155 pounds when he began his NHL career with the Detroit Red Wings, but he acted like he was the biggest and meanest around. “He was fearless,” said Nill, who spent three years as Gallant’s teammate in Detroit. Darryl Sittler called him “an awesome team guy who would be there to back his teammates in every situation.”
Gallant had four- straight seasons of 200- plus penalty minutes, fighting everyone from Bob McGill to Marty McSorley. But playing on a top line with Steve Yzerman, he had four- straight 30- goal seasons and was named to the NHL’s second All- Star team selection after recording a career-best 93 points in 76 games in 1988-89.
A bad back prematurely ended Gallant’s career when he was only 32 years old, but he wasn’t out of the game for long. The rink rat wasn’t going to get a regular job. Instead, he went behind the bench, first as an assistant in the minors before getting hired by MacLean in Columbus. “We didn’t have the Golden Knights,” joked MacLean.
From there, he coached the Saint John Sea Dogs of the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League to two league championships, before returning to the NHL with the Florida Panthers, where he was named a finalist for the Jack Adams Award after winning a franchise- record 47 games in 2015-16, only to be fired months later.
Looking back, he’s turned what could be a negative into a positive.
“The more experience you get, the more confidence you get as a coach,” he said. “You grow a little bit.”