Krog back in Boudreau's orbit
Former well-travelled pro player helping get Canucks skaters ready for new season
Bruce Boudreau's first coaching gig in the American Hockey League was with the Lowell Lock Monsters in 1999-2000.
Fresh off winning the Turner Cup with the Mississippi Sea Wolves, the Los Angeles Kings' ECHL affiliate, Boudreau was promoted to the Lowell job by the Kings after L.A. signed a split-affiliation agreement with the New York Islanders.
Among Boudreau's players that season was Jason Krog, a 24-year-old forward fresh out of U.S. college hockey. Krog had tallied 85 points in 41 games the year before for the University of New Hampshire and was recognized as the best player in the NCAA that season, winning the Hobey Baker Award.
After an on-ice session this week at Burnaby's Scotia Barn, he laughed at the memory of playing for Boudreau, now head coach of the Canucks.
“As any young player back then, I had to earn my stripes. I struggled probably the first half of the season, but then, as it went on, I got more opportunity, especially the second year,” Krog recalled. “(Bruce) helped me develop a lot. He's a great coach, a great people person. And there's a reason why he's had so much success at every level.”
In an era when National Hockey League teams were still worried about a player's size, especially on the wing — the Fernie-raised Krog was listed at 5-foot-10, though he stood an inch or so shorter in reality — Krog went undrafted, despite his clear scoring talents.
The Islanders signed him as a free agent in the summer of 1999. And although Boudreau wasn't an Islanders employee, he was a good fit for Krog: Like his young charge, Boudreau had been a short-statured scoring forward in his playing days.
The transition to pro hockey wasn't easy, though, and Krog struggled to score. Late in the season, Islanders GM Mike Milbury expressed his frustration with how Krog was being deployed and found him a new AHL home in Providence.
His second pro season, in 2000-01, the Islanders and Kings were once again back in a split affiliation in Lowell. Krog found his game and was a point-per-game player for Lowell, until mid-December when Milbury loudly expressed his belief Islanders prospects were playing second fiddle to those of the Kings and reassigned all the Islanders' prospects elsewhere, including Krog, who was one of the team's leading scorers at the time.
Krog finished the season in Springfield. In those first two seasons, he also played 26 NHL games for the Islanders, though he struggled to be the productive scorer Milbury and head coach Butch Goring hoped he would be.
It was the beginning of a long career that took Krog around the NHL, including a four-game cameo with the Vancouver Canucks in 200809, the AHL and the hockey world, finishing up in 2017 in Norway. A career not unlike that of Boudreau, who also never managed to stick in the NHL but who played very well everywhere else.
Two decades later, Krog finds himself helping a handful of Boudreau's prospects prepare themselves for the coming NHL season. It wasn't Boudreau, though, who connected him with the Canucks' players who have been skating over the past week in Burnaby.
Rather, it was Ryan Johnson, the Canucks' assistant to the general manager who brought Krog aboard.
The two were briefly teammates during that 2008-09 season, though Krog was mostly a key figure that year for the Canucks' AHL affiliate Manitoba Moose, leading the team in scoring in the regular season and in the playoffs as the Moose lost the Calder Cup final to the Hershey Bears.
“We have mutual friends: He's from Thunder Bay and my roommate at university was from Thunder Bay. We've known each other a while,” Krog explained.
Since retiring, Krog has been bitten by the coaching bug. He moved back to the Lower Mainland, where his sister and her family plus his parents had settled, and volunteered to help out with his nephew's team.
Krog always enjoyed helping out at summer hockey camps, but has been pleasantly surprised by how much he enjoys doing the day-today work that full-time coaching entails.
“It's four weeks till camp, so it's more working on individual skills, whether it's puck skills or skating fundamentals or situational things early on, and then building into drills where multiple guys are involved. Get a little bit of compete and start bringing in some contact and decision making, and then obviously some conditioning as well,” he said of his plan. “Getting them ready for camp so that they feel good and they feel prepared.”
Going forward, who knows where Krog will end up as a coach. But one thing he knows: Boudreau would be a smart person to emulate.
“He's a great communicator, I think, and that goes a long way, especially with the new generation of players,” said Krog.