NHL playoffs: Positive and negative energy — as well as wins — follow Predators coach Peter Laviolette.
In fourth NHL job, intense coach drives Predators’ success
Peter Laviolette walked out of his office and toward an elevator May 7 at Bridgestone Arena, his right hand on the back of his 14year old daughter, Elisabeth.
He was smiling. This might seem natural for a person sharing a moment with a family member, shortly after achieving something at work significant enough to make a city go bonkers.
But we’re talking about Peter Laviolette, a man whose default setting is “cold glare” when he enters a room.
So this glimpse of Laviolette, a smiling father enjoying the victory against the St. Louis Blues that gave the Predators their first trip to the Western Conference final, brought with it the question of how different he is from the brick wall he projects to the public. And is this latest Laviolette push toward a Stanley Cup, with a young and gifted Predators nucleus, the start of something that will last?
His first three NHL head coaching jobs saw instant turnarounds and immediate success, and all three ended with Laviolette fired and trashed publicly by the people who sent him on his way. He has a knack for inspiring vitriol.
He also has a claim as the best U.S.-born coach in NHL history. He’s the second to win 500 NHL games. He won the Stanley Cup with the Carolina Hurricanes in 2006 and took the Philadelphia Flyers to the Cup Final in 2010, losing to Chicago.
And if Nashville can beat the Ducks three more times, he will become the fourth coach in NHL history to take three different franchises to the Stanley Cup Final. Scotty Bowman, Dick Irvin and Mike Keenan are the others.
That’s elite company. This is a remarkable career, especially when you consider how it started. ‘IT WASN’T FAIR AT ALL’ Bob Luccini has known Laviolette well since coaching him at Frank- lin (Mass.) High in the 1970s, but he has known the Laviolette family for much longer. He played beer league hockey with Laviolette’s father, Big Pete. Big Pete’s father, Art, owned Art’s Grocery in town.
Big Pete ran that store before getting into the garage-door business, and Laviolette had plans to join his father after earning his business degree in 1986 from Westfield (Mass.) State College. He also played hockey for the school’s Division III program, which struggled to compete with most teams on its schedule.
“They’d be down double digits in some games,” Luccini recalled. “But Peter would still be out there diving in front of slap shots.”
A New England-based Minnesota North Stars scout happened to watch Laviolette play as a senior. Al Cerrone wasn’t there to scout him, but he loved his intensity. That led to an invitation to North Stars camp and a minor league contract with the Indianapolis Checkers.
By 1988, Laviolette was a member of the U.S. Olympic hockey team and saw his lone NHL stint in an 11-year playing career. The final tally was 12 games with the New York Rangers and 594 games with six minor-league teams. And it’s usually the athletes who have to grind for everything who make the best coaches.
Laviolette was a coaching success from the start, winning stints in Wheeling, W.Va., and Provi- dence. That’s where he and his wife, Kristen, met. He spent a year as an assistant with the Boston Bruins before Mike Milbury hired him to take over the Islanders. His first day of training camp as an NHL head coach was Sept. 11, 2001, in Lake Placid, N.Y.
“A couple of the young guys showed up late to the morning practice and Peter got right into them,” recalled Alan Hahn, who once covered the Islanders for
Newsday. “All of us beat writers were like, ‘Oh, we’ve got a big story for tomorrow, he’s already screaming at players, how great is this?’ ”
A bigger story emerged that morning. The team ended up having to stay several more days than planned in Lake Placid after the Sept. 11 attacks, and in that time Hahn saw both the intensity and personal touch of Laviolette as a coach. The Islanders were on a seven-year streak of missing the playoffs, but Laviolette’s first team earned 96 points in a startling turnaround.
Both of his teams made the playoffs. But after his second season, Milbury fired him and said: “We were not an inspired group in the end.”
Of course, that was Milbury’s seventh coach firing in seven years as GM — including firing himself twice.
“Peter just kind of accepted it, but it hurt him bad,” Hahn said. “He was blamed for a lot of things that weren’t his fault, and it wasn’t fair at all. In my mind, he’s the best Islanders coach since (four- time Cup winner) Al Arbour.” ‘ANOTHER JOHN WOODEN’ But that set the pattern for Laviolette. He moved on to Carolina and shrewdly put together a 200506 team that was small, fast and built to take advantage of the new rules coming out of the 2004-05 lockout.
“I did more offensive drills as a defenseman that year than I did the rest of my career cumulatively,” said Aaron Ward, a defenseman on that Hurricanes team. “It was not the easiest relationship at first, but by the end of that year, I would have named my kid Peter Laviolette Jr.”
It was a magical run to the Cup, a team heavy on also-rans, or as Ward put it: “Gilligan’s Island with all the castoff defensemen we had.”
Laviolette made sure the team bonded with Monday Night Foot
ball gatherings and poker nights. He had a player taking pictures on trips all season, sworn to secrecy, and used them to put together a motivational video for the start of the playoffs.
The Hurricanes rallied around Julia Rowe, the daughter of neighbors of Laviolette, who was battling leukemia at the time and died in 2008. “Relentless” was their Julia-inspired buzzword, and that’s how they had to play to win a championship.
“A lot of coaches are good tacticians, but Peter actually gets players to believe in a system,” said Pete Friesen, that team’s trainer. “He can outline a whole freaking process and execute it, step by step. I’ve been a trainer for 37 years and he’s the best coach I’ve ever worked with. And I don’t just mean coach, I mean human being. In my mind, he’s another John Wooden.”
But Carolina owner Peter Karmanos Jr. told reporters shortly after firing Laviolette in late 2008: “I didn’t like our coach. His private persona and his public persona were two different things.”
After firing Laviolette three games into the 2013-14 season, three years after the coach got the Flyers to the Cup Final, chairman Ed Snider said, “Our training camp, quite frankly, was one of the worst training camps I’ve ever seen.”
None of it dimmed Predators general manager David Poile’s view of Laviolette.
“I’m very confident in Peter as both as coach and a person,” Poile said. “I’m sure you can find some people who don’t like him, but I’m also sure he’s mostly very popular among the players he has coached.”
Intensity, brutal honesty and winning hockey followed Laviolette to Nashville. Now the Predators are chasing a Cup. There’s no telling if this is just the start or if Nashville will be another short stop. Laviolette declined to be interviewed for this article, which was no surprise.
“He’s probably one of the nicest, down-to-earth people you’ll ever meet,” said Luccini, who has been a Hurricanes scout since 2006. “He could be in a room full of people, talking to the president of the United States, and if he saw a person from Franklin, he’d leave the president right there and go talk to the person from Franklin. That’s Peter.”
On May 7, he and Elisabeth got into the elevator, and Laviolette nodded to a fan in a Predators jersey.
“What did you think?” Laviolette asked the fan of the win against the Blues.
“That was awesome,” the fan said, and Laviolette cracked another smile before getting off the elevator and back to his business.