Craig Ramsay wanted to coach the Winnipeg Jets but says he was frozen out by the new ownership.
As the long list of unrestricted free agents gets smaller by the day, the best available guy out there just might be a coach and not a player.
Craig Ramsay, who was an assistant coach with the Tampa Bay Lightning when they won the Stanley Cup in 2004 and was head coach of the now defunct Atlanta Thrashers last season, has a long track record of making a positive impact as a teacher with the teams that employ him.
The 60-year-old Toronto native, who won the Frank J. Selke Trophy as the NHL’s best defensive forward in 1985, could find himself with a new team, possibly the Florida Panthers, as early as Wednesday.
"There have been some conversations and I’ve narrowed it down," Ramsay said during a phone conversation as he made his way from Atlanta to Buffalo Wednesday morning. "There is one in particular that I am leaning towards because I have family nearby. Whatever job I take I want to be treated with respect for my years of service."
Ramsay had hoped to hang on to his job with the Thrashers, who are now the Jets having transferred the franchise north to Winnipeg.
Was he disappointed at not being retained, but replaced by Claude Noel?
"Not at the end of it, I certainly wasn’t," Ramsay said. "I never got a phone call from the Winnipeg people when they apparently bought the team. None of us did. There are always three choices: ‘We want you; we don’t want you or we really don’t know at this point because we don’t have a general manager in place.’ At least then the communication is open and you’ve spoken to the (new owners) and that didn’t happen. It’s disappointing. I think with 40 years in the business you deserve a call from them to let you know where things stand and where they think they are headed.
"The fact that they dragged it out meant there were jobs that were going by the wayside while we were under the assumption that perhaps Winnipeg was interested in bringing our group along. It was a month or more just sitting by the phone waiting for things to happen while you are under obligation not to talk to other teams because of tampering charges. (General manager) Rick Dudley was at least let go right away so he could go about his business, but you have good people like (assistant coaches) Mike Stothers and John Torchetti and the training staff sitting there waiting for some indication as to what was going on. When Kevin Cheveldayoff got the (GM) job he at least called right away. Other than that we were just sitting there and waiting and that’s not fair."
Ramsay said he had one conversation with a team about its head coaching position, but nothing came of it.
He has had tremendous success as an assistant or associate coach in Florida, Tampa Bay, Boston, Philadelphia and Ottawa
"The reality about what I’ve been through the past year is I’m disheartened as a head coach, so if I go somewhere as an assistant that’s alright with me," Ramsay said.
Because he was mostly a checker as a player and has been closely associated with the late Roger Neilson, a defensive guru, Ramsay is often thought of as a defence-first coach.
He insists that is the furthest thing from the truth.
"My philosophy is really pretty simple: I want to be aggressive and to attack," he said. "I want to play a fun style of hockey; something that is fun for the players to play and fun for the fans to watch. If you go back to my playing days when I was on the checking line in Buffalo with Don Luce and Rick Dudley for a bit and then with Don Luce and Danny Gare, we also contributed on offence.
While I understand the philosophy of being good defensively, I truly believe in a red line-in game rather than a red line-back game. I want to get the puck and force teams to play in their own zone and keep pressure on them."
Wherever Ramsay lands, the team that gets him may be able to say they landed one of the best unrestricted free agents of the off-season.
