Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
EX-WRANGLERS AIDE HAPPILY BIDING TIME IN AUSTRIA
Pallin coaches TWK Innsbruck, keeps eye on NHL openings
AINNSBRUCK, Austria s he guns his orange Renault down Resselstrasse to the rink, Rob Pallin’s mind is racing as fast as the 70 kilometers per hour he’s driving.
Christmas was 10 days away and Pallin’s hockey team had hit a rut. The defense had been leaking. The goaltending was suspect. The calls didn’t seem to go his way. Worst of all, he was concerned that all the good things he accomplished in his first couple of months as head coach of TWK Innsbruck would go for naught.
He didn’t come halfway around the world
to fail. So he’s trying to figure out how to fix it.
“We’ve got to find a way to turn this around,” Pallin said as he went past the rink, Tiroler Wasserkraft Arena, and made a U-turn into a Ramada Hotel parking lot across the street. “We’re better than this.”
He stops at the rink’s restaurant on his way to the locker room and grabs a cafe latte. He may be the head coach, but he pays like everyone else — 2½ Euros.
Pallin, the former assistant coach with the Las Vegas Wranglers, had turned around the perenniallosing Sharks, as TWK Innsbruck is nicknamed. The team, an 11th-place finisher last season in the 12-team Austrian Erste Bank Eishockey Liga (EBEL), had climbed as high as third place earlier this year. It is now fifth with 66 points (21-166), having survived a five-game mid-December losing streak and clinching a playoff berth for the first time in eight years. Pallin was named EBEL Coach of the Year by the league’s media, having turned the franchise around after a 13-26-5 record last season.
RESURRECTING THE SHARKS
Average attendance was up from 700 to nearly 3,000 as fans pay between 14 and 24 Euros to get in. The 3,200-seat rink adjacent to the Olympiahalle, which was used for the 1964 and 1976 Winter Olympics, was built in 2005 and has all the warmth of a neighborhood municipal skating rink with its cement structure and metal seats. But this year, it has been full of life and energy complete with drumbanging, horn-tooting fans who stand behind the goal from the opening faceoff to the final horn.
Pallin, 50, had been fired the year before by Fehervar AV 19 after a series of injuries sent the Hungarian-based team into a tailspin and he was made the scapegoat. But TWK Innsbruck, owned by a hydro-electric company, approached him a couple of weeks later to coach the Sharks and he accepted.
There was one caveat: that Pallin could get out of his contract if he lands a job with an NHL or American Hockey League team. He reached out to the Vegas Golden Knights long before the team had a name or a general manager.
The Chisholm, Minnesota, native has lived in Las Vegas since 1998 and hoped to use his vast network of sources in American hockey to either scout or work in player personnel for the team in his adopted hometown.
He heard back from Golden Knights GM George McPhee who had already identified individuals for the positions Pallin was seeking. Maybe down the road something would open up and he could come back to Las Vegas. Instead, Pallin, who was about to be married and was expecting a child, packed up and moved to Austria.
“It’s everyone’s dream to be in the NHL,” Pallin said. “Hopefully something will work out at some point. But I’m happy. It’s a beautiful city. The owners have been great and the fans are off the charts.”
LOOKING FOR CONTROL
Pallin did his homework before accepting TWK Innsbruck’s offer. He was going to want to have control over the roster and he would spend many a morning during the spring at the Starbucks in Trails Village Center in Summerlin with his iPad, looking at statistics, checking resumes of potential players, spending time on his phone with player agents.
“I had coached against these guys and the first thing I saw was they couldn’t score,” he said of the Sharks. “In 44 games they had just 98 goals so I knew they needed proven scorers. We had to get scoring and we needed to get faster.”
He brought in Andrew Clark, who had played for Golden Knights assistant general manager Kelly McCrimmon with the Brandon Wheat Kings and had played in the ECHL and AHL. He added Austin Smith, a gritty winger who had played with the Texas Stars of the AHL. He found a fast skating winger in Mario Lamoureux, who had starred at North Dakota and whose twin sisters had gained hockey fame playing for Team USA.
“He came in here and changed the culture,” said Tyler Spurgeon, the team’s captain and whose brother Jared plays in the NHL for the Minnesota Wild. “It was tough being here last year. The team was just happy to compete. But he wants to win and he wants you to enjoy playing the game. He’s made everything from top to bottom better.”
Clark is third in the EBEL with 55 points while Lammers is fifth with 50 and Smith No. 8 with 46 and a team leading 22 goals. Overall, the Sharks have 148 goals this season. They’ve also allowed 149, secondworst in the league.
Management was so pleased by the start that it offered Pallin a threeyear contract extension last month. He took it for one year because he doesn’t know what his hockey future holds. Still, he wanted some financial security for his family.
“I have a wife and a kid now,” he said, referring to his wife Dora and his 4½-month-old daughter Emily who was born in Austria in late September. “The people here have been great to me. And for Dora, who was born and raised in Hungary, she’s very comfortable living in this part of the world.”
AT HOME IN AUSTRIA
The couple and their baby live in a 2,000 square-foot, three-bedroom apartment in Vols, a village of about 6,600 people that’s a 10-minute drive from Innsbruck. It is a charming place with friendly people, nestled at the foot of the Nordkette mountain range.
“He’s much more relaxed,” Dora said of her husband. “I think being a father has changed him. He comes home and the baby is always smiling at him and it puts a smile on his face.”
The family is comfortable in Austria. Pallin easily engages in conversation with the locals, his German passable.
The players say the quality of play in the EBEL is equivalent to that of a mid-level AHL game. There are scattered former NHL players around the league. One of them, Jamie Lundmark, scored twice in the third period to lead Klagenfurt to a 4-3 win Dec. 9 which started the Sharks on their five-game tailspin and made the 4½-hour bus ride back to Innsbruck seem like 14½.
Unlike the Wranglers, who had a special bus equipped with beds when they traveled around the ECHL, the Sharks don’t travel so luxuriously. They’re no rock band. At least not yet. It is deathly quiet on the long ride home. Losing a game you had no business losing will do that to a team.
After losing a home game to his former team, Fehervar, Pallin is steaming as he pulls into his driveway. Clark had been leveled by a hit to the head in the first period and no penalty was called. The Sharks had squandered a pair of two-goal leads and lost on a late power-play goal when goaltender Andy Chiodo was beaten from the blue line.
Pallin picked up his phone and called Spurgeon. They talked for about 20 minutes in a profanitylaced conversation from Pallin’s end. Truth is, it was an excellent piece of coaching. Pallin knew he couldn’t lose the locker room at the first sign of trouble and he wanted his captain’s assurance that the team wasn’t going to become fractured and abandon him.
“You win with character,” Pallin said. “We have to outwork people to win. And maybe things got a little too comfortable too soon.
“We’re still well ahead of where we were last year. But that’s not the point. When you have opportunities to get three points and you come away with nothing like we’ve been doing, that’s hard to make up.”
In the EBEL, a win is worth three points and a tie in regulation gets you one. The Sharks finally ended their skid Dec. 23, beating Gratz 3-2 for their first points in two weeks. They followed with a 5-1 win over Salzburg and moved back into a tie for fifth. They remain there as the EBEL shifts into phase two of the schedule with the 10-game run-up to the playoffs.
KEEPING IT IN PERSPECTIVE
The losses are always tough. But as Pallin holds his baby daughter in his arms, looks out at the view of the mountains, a calm comes over him. He isn’t working for an NHL team, but he’s getting paid pretty well (about 82,000 Euros) to be a professional head coach.
“I’m truly blessed,” he said. “I’m doing what I love and I have a great situation here. I have a beautiful family supporting me. Emily doesn’t care if we win or lose. She’s just happy to see her daddy. And Dora is very understanding.
“Don’t get me wrong. I still want us to win and make a run at the championship. That’s why they brought me here. But I believe we can win and I’m going to do everything I can to see to it that we do.”
If he can pull that off and win the EBEL title, perhaps they won’t charge him for his daily cafe latte at the rink. Given what he’s already accomplished, he should at least get a discount.