It is easy to surmise by watching Brian Kilrea that he couldn't take much joy from his job and must despise the adolescents who screw up his drills. I can assure you that just the opposite is true.
OTTAWA -- Brian Kilrea stood at centre ice and the Ottawa 67's lined the boards as he put them through a Saturday morning skate recently. Things had gone well the night before, a win over Barrie on this same patch of ice, but to his mind things weren't going well enough this a.m. Kilrea blew his whistle in the middle of line rush that had devolved into bad shinny.
"Fourth line," he shouted, his rasp carrying to the farthest reaches of the empty Civic Centre. "You took two bad (expletive) penalties and were on for a (expletive) goal against ... the (expletive) puck is supposed to go in the (expletive) corner ... could you at least do the (expletive) drill?"
I covered Kilrea's teams for several years, made it dozens of games, rode the Ottawa bus and saw this scene play out hundreds of times. If you were wandering into the arena this Saturday morning and catching a 67's practice for the first time, you might think you had witnessed a form of child abuse. And that the fella at centre ice was so irritated that he couldn't take much joy from his job and must have despised the adolescents who kept on screwing up drills. I can assure you that this was not the case. Not even close. In fact, just the opposite.
Look, if the Son of God were on the 67's roster and on the blue line, routinely wiring 150 m.p.h. slapshots into the top corner from his own zone, Kilrea would benevolently advise him: "There's three places you can go with the puck in your own end ... 1. Off the glass, 2. Off the glass, and 3. Off the (expletive) glass."
Don't mistake the rhetoric of the message for the character of the messenger.
If you follow junior hockey even casually, you know that the coaching career of Brian Kilrea is winding down. That he's the only major junior coach who has racked up 1,000 victories. And that he's the only one whose plaque hangs in the Hockey Hall of Fame.
If you follow the game a little more devoutly, if you've made it out to arenas where Kilrea's teams have played and have been within earshot of the coach's voice (which would be anywhere up to standing room), you know that an era will pass at the end of this season. He is the very embodiment of old-time hockey. Think that overstates it? Consider: The guy used to play for Eddie Shore. When the NHL was a six-team league he was a career minor-leaguer who considered himself lucky to buy a ticket to the Olympia to see Gordie Howe play.
Old-time hockey isn't much for introspection and the last thing Kilrea would ever be is maudlin. No regrets-I've-had-a-few. No violins, please.
Kilrea, who will turn 75 on the occasion of his next birthday, will coach his final regular-season game at the Civic Centre. The last game he works behind the bench is TBD, depending entirely on the playoff run of a 67's team that has been third in the Eastern Conference standings for most of the season. The team marketing department has worked this storyline into a promotion: Killer's Last Charge. True in a couple of senses of the word. It's like a last charge into a battle, an uphill one. And Kilrea's having a charge at the same time.
"Jeff Hunt [the 67's owner] told me that if I wanted I could make trades and load up to try to go for it this season," Kilrea said as he was unlacing his skates after the practice. "I didn't want to leave the cupboard bare when I left - that wouldn't be fair to Chris [Byrne, the assistant coach who will take over the top job next fall]. We've got only one over-ager. We've got a young team: a bunch of 17-year-olds, some 16-year-olds. We've had injuries-the worst one was losing [defenceman] Tyler Cuma for the season with a knee. Still, I like this team. This is a team that competes hard. They might get beat some nights. They might get out-scored. But so long as they're not out-worked, I got no kick with them."
Kilrea will tell you that Bobby Smith was the best player he has ever coached and when he looks down at his bench he doesn't see anyone who resembles Smith. The nearest thing is Logan Couture. Smith was a first-overall pick whose OHL season-scoring records look virtually untouchable more than three decades after. Couture is a first-round draft pick in the top 10 in league scoring, but Hockey Canada didn't even invite him to tryouts for the under-20 team.
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| Brian Kilrea and Don Cherry are fixtures at the annual Home Hardware CHL-NHL Top Prospects Game. (Getty) |
Kilrea will tell you that Doug Wilson was the best defenceman he ever coached and when he looks down at his bench he doesn't see anyone who resembles Wilson. The nearest thing is Tyler Cuma. Wilson was one of the great point men of his time, less appreciated now than he should be. Whenever I hear his name mentioned I think of his work in the Canada Cup in 1984. Cuma would have been on the Canadian team at the world juniors in Ottawa this past holiday season if not for the injury suffered in the tryouts.
Still, Kilrea holds out hope that this team will surprise. He says that his most over-achieving teams were the most recent two he took to the Memorial Cup tournament, the 2001 and 2005 editions. Having seen many of their games, I'll break the tie here. The 2005 67's did really well to win the Eastern Conference but only had to win three rounds to assure its place in Memorial Cup because London was the host team. In 2001, the 67's had to win the OHL outright -- four rounds -- with the biggest upset coming in the conference final, a stirring six-game triumph over heavily favoured Plymouth. I covered that final in its entirety (and endured one of the worst cases of car-lag in OHL history). I don't know if there was ever a more resilient bunch of teenagers.
"Seamus Kotyk [the goaltender in 2001] was probably the most curious kid I ever had," Kilrea said. "Marched to the beat of his own drummer. What kid likes to spend time off the ice playing bingo? Nothing seemed to bother him. When Plymouth puts four by him in Game 1, I ask him how he feels and he says, 'Yeah, good.' And then we come back to win the game, down three goals in the third period."
That team had no one who jumped out as a NHL prospect. Joe Talbot was too small for the NHL circa 2001. Zenon Konopka didn't skate well enough to play in the NHL in any era. Lance Galbraith could get away with mayhem at this level but definitely not in prime time - he spent so much time running his mouth and giving out facewashes that you almost didn't notice that he was scoring a goal a game. None of them were a priority for the NHL scouts and all seemed to max out at the East Coast League level. The core of their defence -- Jeremy Van Hoof, Jon Zion and Luke Sellers -- played a combined one game in the NHL.
Sportsnet reporter Ian Mendes joined Brian Kilrea for a day-in-the-life feature that can be seen on Hockeycentral Saturday and Connected. Check the TV Schedule for times in your region.
Still, they were very good junior players and collectively they had a great hockey IQ. Oh yeah, I saw Kilrea bag-skate them in practice after the (expletive) puck didn't go in the (expletive) corner during a drill, but they were game smart, intuitive. I don't know of a group that came as close as they did to maxing out their talent. But for a brutal shoulder injury to Talbot -- the doctor told me that he'd never seen one like that in hockey, just in car accidents -- that 67's team might have killed a couple of more giants at the Memorial Cup in Regina.
And Kilrea won't under-estimate any of his players this spring. He would have laughed if anyone had told him that Zenon Konopka was going to play a NHL game. Ottawa fans roasted me in 2001 when I wrote that Konopka had no shot at a pro career, while Plymouth star Stephen Weiss would make millions. Well, the back half turned out to be true but to my amazement (no less than Kilrea's) Konopka managed to get called up for a few games with Anaheim and later the Blue Jackets.
Kilrea likes what will be the last team he'll coach. It's not his most talented team, but then again, his most talented team didn't win the Memorial Cup. "The year after we went to the Memorial Cup final and lost we had an even better team but the Soo and Wayne Gretzky took us to an eighth game [in the old eight-point series format] and we just ran out of gas," he said.
There isn't anyone on the team who works as hard as Peter Lee (whose OHL career goal-scoring record was just broken by John Tavares) did but that's not a knock, just a fact. "They talk about first-one-on-the-ice, last-one-off," Kilrea said. "Peter was in a class by himself. We'd have to chase him off the ice an hour after practice ended. We had to get him weighted pucks. He'd work on his shot from every angle, shots on one leg, everything you could imagine. Nobody worked like him or wanted it any more than he did."
"Trade you?" Kilrea replied. "I've been trying to (expletive) trade you all season long. Nobody (expletive) wants you." The 67's coach responding to a trade request. |
There isn't anyone quite as smart as Bobby Smith, who was carrying a full load of university courses while starring for the 67's. There isn't anyone who is as good at both ends of the ice as Alyn McCauley was. There isn't anybody who has improved one season to the next like Brian Campbell did, going from a decent if under-sized defenceman one year to CHL player of the year the next. There isn't anyone as funny as Jim Ralph and Shawn Simpson, who would get on the microphone on bus rides and kill countless hours with jokes and impersonations, occasionally of the guy smoking a cigar in the front seat. There won't be anyone his team will have to face who will be as good as Wayne Gretzky, still the best junior Kilrea has ever seen (and who, as a dust-covered rumour had it, might have been headed to Ottawa if he hadn't bolted the Soo after a season to sign with the WHA).
There's no knowing how many of these 67's will get a mention when Kilrea makes his speech before Sunday's game at the Civic Centre. "I'm just going to take Bert's speech and change a couple of lines," Kilrea said after practice Saturday. The night before the team and the city paid tribute to Bert O'Brien, Kilrea's longtime assistant and, in this case, his warm-up act in retirement send-offs. "Just don't forget your glasses like I did," O'Brien said. "They didn't let me go back to get them ... said there wasn't enough time. So I couldn't read what I had written. I had to go from memory and left some things out."
There will be some things that Kilrea will have to leave out even if he brings his glasses with him when he gets behind the mike and the ovation dies down. Like there are some things I'm going to have to leave out here; simply too much history in 32 seasons and not enough time and space. The focus will be on the two Memorial Cup championships, the three OHL championships and the dozens of alumni who went on to the NHL. The tough part will be those who won't be there Sunday.
"Just in the last year we lost three good friends in about two weeks," Kilrea says. "That's what happens when you reach a certain age. Thankfully, my health and Bert's health have been good enough to let us keep on coaching as long as we have. Better to go now while it's still our choice.
"It's not like I'm giving up hockey. I'm staying on as general manager. I won't miss the bus but I'll enjoy scouting, always have. I like getting out to the rinks all over the place and meeting all the people in the game."
Brian Kilrea says that the players haven't changed over all those seasons. He hasn't changed either. Not even a little bit. That practice Saturday morning ... same as the practice last year, 10 years ago, back to when Bobby Smith and Doug Wilson were on the ice. As one 67's alumnus said to me: "One thousand wins, one practice."
He still loves the game but that doesn't mean he's going to go soft or sentimental. His players, the fourth line especially, should be advised: On Saturday he looked like he still had one bag skate left in him, especially if that (expletive) puck doesn't go in the (expletive) corner.
Things that fell out of my notebook (Brian Kilrea tribute edition)
My favourite Kilrea quote from years back requires a brief set-up. I was turning around a story on three over-age players in the Ottawa line-up and that day I had allotted one hour to call up the players' parents. Seemed like time enough until I got the first one on the line, a player's mother who spoke for an hour without allowing me a chance to ask a single question. As a result she was the only parent quoted in the story. The next day I spoke with the coach and he asked me why only one parent got a chance to get two cents in. I explained my one-sided conversation. Kilrea's response accompanied by a roll of the eyes: "In all my years of coaching, all my best players were orphans." ... Because of health issues Kilrea took one other stab at retirement, back in '94, and brought in Peter Lee as coach. It didn't work out. "Peter didn't realize that everyone doesn't want to work the way he did." ... Overheard years back: A disgruntled forward, a talented kid with a bad headbone, confronted Kilrea in front of teammates and a couple of wandering media interlopers. "That's it, I want to be traded," the kid said. "Trade you?" Kilrea replied. "I've been trying to (expletive) trade you all season long. Nobody (expletive) wants you." ... My favourite shot at Kilrea taken by one of his friends was offered by Floyd Smith, Kilrea's linemate in Springfield. "When you see Killer, let him know that I was telling you about how he was our centre and how he used to deflect the puck to us." ... When I looked at those Springfield teams, it's amazing to see how many famous names were on the sidelines in the Original Six era. Gump. Shack. Ted Harris. Larry Hillman. All ended up with their names on the Cup. ... It's still remarkable to think that Kilrea played one game for the Detroit Red Wings back in the 1957-58 season and then went back to the minors until expansion in 1967. One of the three goals in his 26-game NHL career was the first in the history of the Los Angeles Kings. I have to imagine purple clashed with his complexion ... When I asked Kilrea about the best player he ever coached, he automatically mentioned Smith and Wilson, but offered a note for readers whose grasp of history might not be great. "I didn't coach Denis Potvin," he said. "I came in after." I remember Denis Potvin back when. Denis Potvin didn't suffer because of the 20-year-old draft -- he just made everyone else suffer. It's not that he could have played in the NHL at 18 or 19. He would have been on the Norris ballot at that age. And I don't know that I ever saw a junior as tough as him ... And, yes, Kilrea's preferred reading on road trips was Nick Carter's Killmaster series, dime-store spy novels from the early 1960s. Yes, he threw on Snowbird on the stereo.
