Stephane Quintal arrived in Boston 26 autumns ago, unable to speak a word of English. The Bruins had him bunk in with a local couple, Tom and Nicole Hynes, as a means of easing his transition into New England life.
“They are, still today, like a second set of parents for me,” he says.
That all these years later Quintal, 46, is the first francophone to hold down a major portfolio in the NHL head office has probably been unreasonably overlooked, at least in English Canada, as a noteworthy advancement in the hockey industry.
He prefers to play it down as well.
“It’s very flattering that people think that,” he told Sportsnet this week. “But I have this job because I worked hard, I played for 16 years. I’ve worked here for almost four years. I do this job because of my experience on the ice.”
He is the NHL’s new sheriff, the head of the player safety department, as it is now known, succeeding Brendan Shanahan, who established the department. That formalized the office, but really, Shanahan was in many ways succeeding Colin Campbell, who took over from Brian Burke, who came after Gil Stein, who briefly took over the job Brian O’Neill did for years.
As long as there’s been an NHL, there’s been a need for someone to say when the line has been crossed. Now it’s the man they call “Q,” just like the James Bond character, but without all the fancy little inventions.
Burke was bombastic, Campbell was folksy and Shanahan was innovative, creating the practice of providing video explanations of his decisions. Quintal, so far, has been low-key and almost invisible, partly because his workload has been relatively light this season, and partly because he has preferred until now to do very few interviews.
All was quiet throughout the NHL pre-season this year, and then in the regular season until Oct. 27. Since then, he handed down seven suspensions in eight days, including a three-game suspension meted out to Jack Johnson of the Columbus Blue Jackets earlier this week.
“Every night, we kept thinking, tonight we’ll get our first suspension,” he says.“You don’t want too many, but there’s going to be some. We knew we were not going to go through a year without a suspension.”
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A four-game suspension handed down to Anton Volchenkov of the Nashville Predators attracted some criticism from Nashville officials, but to this point, Quintal has yet to be in the middle of a full-blown storm, anything like Burke was when Claude Lemieux hit Kris Draper, or Campbell was when Mike Richards hit Marc Savard, or Mike Murphy was when Campbell recused himself from decisions involving Boston (his son Gregory plays for the Bruins) and Murphy decided not to suspend Zdeno Chara for his frightening hit on Max Pacioretty that had the entire Canadiens organization, including owner Geoff Molson, up in arms.
Quintal hasn’t had one of those doozies yet, but he will.
“I think if you do this job with integrity and you’re consistent and you’re honest and transparent, people will disagree with you, but you get some respect,” he said. “I want to make the game fair, make the game as safe as I can, but keep the game tough and exciting. “I love watching games. I love hockey. At the end of the night when there’s no suspensions and no injuries and there’s been some great games, we’re happy at player safety.”
Quintal played 16 seasons for six different teams, including Montreal twice, after being a first round draft choice, 14th overall, in 1987, one pick after Dean Chynoweth (241 NHL games) and one pick before Joe Sakic, a future Hall of Famer and now one of the NHL executives Quintal has to answer to.
Quintal played a rough-and-tumble brand of hockey in 1,037 regular season matches, and was involved in 113 fights over his career, including five with legendary enforcer Bob Probert.
“I think in a couple of them I did okay,” he smiles.
He was suspended once for kneeing Bob Bougher, now the head coach of the OHL Windsor Spitfires, in the head after first punching him to the ice. Quintal wasn’t purely a brawler, and he took a regular shift as a defenceman on most teams he played on. But he didn’t shy away from the violent aspects of the game.
“I had a long career,” he says. “I wish I would have stayed on one team, not been traded so much. I think I played the game tough and honest. And I want to be tough and honest in this job I have now.”
After a final season playing in Italy, he retired in 2005. There was a brief stint in television, which he didn’t like, then he started a fitness club business. He met with Shanahan, an old St. Louis teammate, in Montreal in 2011, and Shanahan thought he might have a job for Quintal if he was interested. Quintal came aboard and hasn’t left.
He was “shocked” when Shanahan stepped down last April to become president of the Toronto Maple Leafs, and equally surprised when Shanahan’s job was offered to him on a interim basis for the playoffs. This fall, he got the job on a full-time basis, and felt he was ready.
“I knew what I was getting into,” he says.
Quintal recently moved to a smallish 1,000 square-foot apartment in TriBeCa that should be big enough when his two kids, 11 and 9, visit. He takes the subway to and from work every day, usually with a backpack across his shoulders.
He was still playing hockey twice a week in Montreal before he moved, and recently found a pretty good game in Chelsea Piers on Wednesday afternoons.
He’s not revolutionizing the process like Shanahan did; he’s really continued the course set by his predecessor.
“I think Brendan put a great team together,” he says. “I wouldn’t say it’s easy now, but with the technology and camera angles now, we can get great shots if somebody did something wrong.”
The emphasis on consistency and video evidence seems to, at least at this point, have made NHL suspensions no longer quite the hot button issue they were at various times in the last 15 to 20 years. The process is light years removed from the days when teams would send tapes of incidents into the league begging for action against players on other teams.
Shanahan tried to educate and persuade players about certain kinds of on-ice actions before suspending them, and that has created a league in which every night you see players turn away from questionable hits that once might have been almost automatic.
We can argue over whether NHL suspensions are in general too light, and amount to little more than slaps on the wrist. But there’s no questions there is more consistency now. There were 56 suspensions in Shanahan’s first year, 21 in the lockout-shortened season that followed, then 43 last year before Shanahan left. Quintal handed down another five after that in the playoffs when he had the job on an interim basis, with Matt Cooke’s seven-game suspension for knee-capping Tyson Barrie attracting the most scrutiny.
“When a player has been suspended that often, it’s hard to compare him to anybody else,” he says.
Twelve floors above the Avenue of the Americas in downtown Manhattan, a panel of NHL workers gather every night before 12 flickering screens in the Player Safety room to keep an eye on possible trouble. While the NHL operations room in Toronto is in charge of video review issues, the New York office is watching for questionable hits and incidents.
While Quintal oversees the action, his right-hand man Damian Echevarrieta quarterbacks the gathering of video evidence along with Burke’s son, Patrick. Together, Echevarrieta and Burke are the point men, and chief hecklers, in a room that is part science project and part frat house for the good-natured chirping and arguing that goes on every night.
Echevarrieta has been an indispensable member of the NHL hockey department ever since he and Campbell jerry-rigged a group of televisions in the old NHL headquarters back in 1999 to construct a de facto observation room, albeit one that was plunged into darkness one night by a cleaning woman closing a shutter one night.
Former Pittsburgh coach Dan Bylsma, now with the NHL Network, was a visitor this past Tuesday night, and immediately joined the discussions on controversial plays.
“Geez, Dan, looking for a job?” quips Burke.
The evening starts slowly, with eyebrows raised when Columbus defenceman David Savard hits tiny Nathan Gerbe of the Hurricanes, and when Scott Hartnell hits Chris Terry high. Notes are taken, video clips are gathered, but nothing comes of it.
Just past 8:30 p.m., Alexander Ovechkin delivers what looks like a head shot on Calgary’s Curtis Glencross and isn’t penalized. More notes, more clips, but with a little more intensity.
Fifteen minutes later Bobby Ryan of the Senators seems to make contact with the head of Brendan Smith. Replays, notes, clips, discussions.
Then comes the big one of the night, again from the Columbus-Carolina game. Just after 9:15, Jiri Tlusty moves the puck to his right in the neutral zone and then is caught with a thundering shoulder from Blue Jackets rearguard Jack Johnson, who appears to make contact first with Tlusty’s head.
The video is examined, and it’s determined contact was made .43 seconds after Tlusty passes the puck, which doesn’t meet the unofficial threshold for a late hit. Etchevarietta and Burke exchange views on the incident. Bylsma chimes in with his thoughts, sharply disagreeing with the others. Quintal comes in and out of the room. His first action will be to send an email to his two key advisors, Chris Pronger and Pat LaFontaine, with the video of the Johnson hit attached and a simple question, “Thoughts?”
The idea is to get initial feedback from each person without them knowing what others think. Later, he’ll have a phone conversation with both men, and also get the opinions of Murphy, Campbell, Kris King and Kay Whitmore up in Toronto.
The next day, Johnson was suspended for three games, costing him $70,276 in pay.
“This is an illegal check to the head,” says Burke, taking the role Shanahan used to have on the explanatory videos. “Tlusty is eligible to be hit. In fact, he should expect to be hit on this play. But no player should have to expect his head will be the main point of contact.”
This basic process will likely go on about 1,000 times this seasons, with 40 suspensions a reasonable number to expect by the end of June.
Head hits, it’s clear, take up the majority of the player safety department’s time and focus these days, a big change from the days when getting caught with your head down made a player fair game. The video explanations have installed a rigour and discipline to the process that never existed before.
Quintal says he’s just continuing the job that Shanahan did, and while the NHLPA might not like him saying it, he sees his job as fighting for the victim in these incidents.
“When a player gets suspended, the only people who are fighting for the player who was injured is us,” he says. “The player who got injured isn’t there to defend himself. I’m not sure if the players realize that… that we’re fighting for them.”