EDMONTON — Dallas Eakins speaks often of a swagger he’d like to see his new team acquire. He is trying to re-install a confidence gene that has that been stripped from the Edmonton Oilers organizational DNA through two decades of losing hockey.
So he has come in talking the talk, and leading by example. Eakins absolutely roasted young Lars Eller, not even waiting for a question to be asked by a reporter before laying into a 24-year-old Danish kid who’d accurately assessed the Oilers game as “a little bit like a junior team.”
You can do that with impunity, if you’ve been around for a while. Which Eakins has not. Not as an NHL coach. Or you can do it if you’re winning. Which Eakins definitely is not. But Eakins remains unrepentant. “If I come in here pretending to be someone else, then I’m in big trouble,” he says. “I don’t second guess anything. How I’ve approached our players, the media, the city, management… I have a plan in place and I’m not going away from it.”
Across the ice on Tuesday night is an example of that plan. Toronto’s Nazem Kadri has risen to the position of first-line centre with the Maple Leafs. It was Kadri who Eakins is given credit for turning into a pro when the player was in the American Hockey League and Eakins was coach of the Marlies. “Some people may have argued that I wasn’t a professional off the ice, in the gym,” Kadri says. “I’ve completely turned that around. Half of that is because of Dallas. Sometimes these things don’t work right away, especially with young players. That’s what you saw with me.”
Eakins says Kadri finally just got to a point where he decided he was going to play like a pro, and that’s when he started having success in the NHL. Asked how many of his current players are at that crossroads, Eakins responds, “We have a number.”
Successfully transforming those players is just one of several jobs on Eakins’ to do list. When you inherit a team that has finished 30th 30th, 29th and 24th the past four seasons, it’s a job that might be turning out to be bigger than he had expected. “You know what the answers are, and you know what’s coming,” he says. “But there’s a part of you that is so optimistic that it’s going to all turn perfectly. It (has been) a little messy, a challenge. And I’m fine with that.”
Hockey people are stubborn to change. Especially the elders who man the press boxes each night as scouts and front office types, who hear a rookie coach doing lengthy interviews, and spouting new ideas with great confidence. “So, how’s ‘The Genius’ doin’ in Edmonton?” they ask a guy from the Big E, on almost a nightly basis.
He is an open book is the answer, or at least, as open as an NHL coach can be. He says more in one availability than Jacques Martin would in three months, and isn’t afraid to sound like a guy who has the answers. Eakins is doing things differently, and with the courage to openly discuss the process. In 25 years around the game, I’ve seen a few coaches who do not take part in the morning skate with their teams. Never before, however, have I seen one spend the time, on more than one occasion, sitting among the media watching the skate.
His explanation is sound: Eakins meets with the players before the skate, often in a special-teams meeting. He is there waiting for them at 5 p.m. for pre-game meetings. He’s standing behind them on the bench throughout the game, barking orders and instructions. When he says that they need a break from him for the rehearsal that is the morning skate—which he has declared optional all season long—it’s tough not to consider that progressive thinking on his part.
But progressive thinking lays one bare in the hockey community, often taken as a statement that all the smart hockey men who have done things a certain way for all these years had it wrong. That you’re a little smarter than everyone else; that you’ve got it all figured out. Conventional wisdom says, when you lose, say little. When you win, say less. When you are the Edmonton Oilers, and you’re 27th in the NHL—again—challenging others on the way they do things is perhaps something you should completely drop from the repertoire for a while.
But that isn’t Eakins’ style. And if you don’t like it? Tough luck, pal.