LAMORIELLO, TROTZ DYNAMIC HOCKEY DUO
Experience at the top on display as Isles advance while former teams eliminated
It isn’t the nature of hockey lifers Lou Lamoriello or Barry Trotz to celebrate the misfortune of their previous employers — but deep down there has to be more than a little I-told-you-so on the inside from the general manager and coach of the surviving New York Islanders.
It is two years since Trotz won the Stanley Cup with the Washington Capitals and in each of the years that followed, Washington was eliminated in the first round of the playoffs.
It is two years since Lamoriello was pushed aside as general manager of the Toronto Maple Leafs — that was the plan and Brendan Shanahan was sticking to it no matter what. In each of the years without Lamoriello, the Leafs have diminished in points, last year losing in the first round, this year losing in the round before the official first round.
Two years without Trotz, no progress for the champion Capitals. Two years without Lamoriello, no progress for the free-spending, talent laden Leafs.
This could be a giant coincidence or maybe more than that, an easy hockey lesson in all of this: How much experience matters. How much quality management and coaching matters. How much the notion of team building matters and the now defeated concept that great players make great teams.
Maybe it’s exactly the opposite: Maybe with great coaching and management great players make great teams. And in the Trotz vernacular, every player has to give up just a little of himself to make the whole a lot stronger.
Pushing Lamoriello out made some sense in Toronto at the time, mostly because of his age. He was 75 when the Leafs took his GM job away and asked him to be an adviser, knowing he wouldn’t stay. They might have thought age mattered. Lamoriello won’t allow himself to think that way.
To him, age has always been an insignificant number: What matters is whether you can do the job.
As he’s said to me on a number of occasions, “If I can’t do the job, I’ll get out. If I don’t have the energy for it or the passion, I’ll get out.”
When he checks off the list now, as he approaches his 78th birthday in October, he has not slowed down, he does his exercise and his hockey work daily, he pushes himself as he has always pushed himself, and his team has been one of the truly great stories of the past two NHL seasons.
Shanahan pushed Lamoriello aside because he wanted young Kyle Dubas as general manager and was worried if he didn’t move Lamoriello aside he’d lose Dubas to another NHL team.
And how quickly does life move in the NHL? Dubas was named GM of the Leafs on May 11, 2018. Lamoriello was hired on May 22 to run the Islanders. One month later, Lou hired Barry Trotz to coach. Nine days after that, Dubas signed John Tavares, the Islanders captain and best player, for the Leafs.
And back then, it seemed the Leafs were heading in one direction, the Islanders in another, which was true, just the opposite of what most people thought.
Now it seems almost everything the Islanders represent, the Leafs are lacking. Everything the Sunshine Boys, Lamoriello and Trotz believe in — defence first, team first, no individual bigger than any team — has sent the Isles to the second round of the playoffs two years in a row. The Leafs, with all their stars, have yet to win a round.
The convenient story with the former champion Capitals is that Trotz and general manager Brian MacLellan couldn’t come to a contract agreement after the championship was won. That sounds good and makes some sense, after the fact, but the truth is somewhere in between.
Heading into that final, the word was abuzz around hockey insiders that Trotz was leaving the Caps at the end of the season. It was clear he and MacLellan weren’t getting along the way a coach and GM need to get along. And however each of them saw the future, the picture wasn’t the same.
It’s hard to part ways with a Stanley Cup winning coach and sell the story to the public so they went public with — they couldn’t come to an agreement. It was already known in the playoffs that Todd Reirden, his assistant, would replace Trotz.
The same Reirden who was shown the door Saturday in Washington. Meanwhile, Trotz and Lamoriello, with a combined 55 seasons of NHL work behind them, were shown their own kind of door, being moved from one bubble hotel in downtown Toronto to another.
A promotion or sorts for the two old men who were pushed aside not so long ago.