Sportsnet’s Mark Spector sat down with Edmonton Oilers coach Todd McLellan for a one-on-one chat. In Part 1 of the interview, McLellan talks about how he got to where he is today. Be sure to check back for Part 2 on Thursday, when McLellan talks about his new challenge with the Oilers.
From Swift Current to San Jose, to Utrecht, Holland, hockey has led Todd McLellan to places and situations that he never would have found otherwise.
On this day he is sitting across the picnic table on the beach of beautiful Okanagan Lake, home of the mythical serpent Ogopogo. He’s seen monsters in this business, and fairy tales too.
Today however, the latest in a series of head coaches in Edmonton is trying to explain what it was like being the coach of the Swift Current Broncos when the news broke that former coach Graham James was a pedophile who was abusing some of the Broncos players.
“When I got to Swift Current, Graham had won a Memorial Cup,” he begins. “Graham had got the community through a bus accident in which four young guys — two of my really good friends — were killed. The team played a different game — there was all the fighting back then, but they crushed teams on the power play. He was a really unique hockey guy who was well thought of in the hockey world. He was named Man of the Year by The Hockey News.
“I thought, ‘Man, do I have big shoes to fill here.’ Well, two years later it comes out that all this stuff’s been going on, investigations are going on, and now you don’t want to be anywhere near those shoes anymore.”
It was McLellan’s first foray into rebuilding a team’s spirit. His first try at building something that his players could trust and believe in.
“You immediately take care of the group in front of you — the 20 players who are there. But the phone calls that came in: ‘What’s going on?’ ‘Who’s still involved?’ ‘Is anyone around anymore?’ A lot of explaining to parents for past wrongs, and trying to assure them that there is a good community here, good people. That we’ve got it going in the right direction. ‘It’s not what it was…’”
Later on in San Jose, his clubs would arrive at camp each year with their belief shaken for far different reasons, having lost again in another failed playoff run. Now it’s Edmonton, where the young core has done nothing but lose, on a team that will tie a National Hockey League record for futility if it misses the playoffs for the 10th straight season this spring.
McLellan will use every bit of experience accrued along the way — in North Battleford, in Swift Current, in Houston, as an assistant in Detroit, in San Jose — to build belief in Edmonton. Because McLellan will tell you, without that foundation in place you can’t build a damned thing.
“When I was in Detroit, they had a belief system that was very strong; a belief that you had to play a certain way. If they didn’t win the Cup one year (GM) Kenny Holland didn’t go out and change that. They weren’t chasing the team that won the Cup that year.”
As an organization, the Red Wings are comfortable in their own skin. As a coach, now almost 48 years old with two sons (Tyson, 19, Cale, 16), wife Debbie, and his second job as an NHL head coach, McLellan is the same.
We sat down in Penticton with McLellan over a coffee — he’s fast becoming a Tim Horton’s guy again, now that he’s back in Canada — for an extended conversation, as he begins this new chapter. In Part 1 we’ll explore how the Oilers new head coach became the man he is, and on Thursday in Part 2 we’ll ask him how he plans to attack the job in Edmonton.
On his humble beginnings
McLellan grew up in small town Saskatchewan, the son of an RCMP officer who moved through towns such as Goodeve, Melville and Goodsoil before settling in Saskatoon. He had a brother and sister, twins 10 months younger than him.
“We didn’t have a lot of money,” he recalls, “but the one thing we always had, my brother and I and my sister, we always had new skates. In August, you could feel it a little bit, that there wasn’t as much money in the family. But somehow, we always got new skates in the fall.”
He would eventually coach under Mike Babcock in Detroit, evolving like Babcock from the Western Canadian, Clare Drake school of coaching, and McLellan was in Detroit when Scotty Bowman was there as well. Those are three of the top coaches the game of hockey has ever seen.
On his greatest influence
“My dad was my hockey influence and my character influence too. Pretty disciplined; that RCMP regimen of detail, planning, thinking things through. He always could send us a message in his certain way,” he said, breaking into a story.
In high school there was no curfew, but it was expected that respect be shown nonetheless. If he stretched the boundaries of his freedom too far, “At 7 a.m. the lawn mower would be running outside my bedroom window. Sometimes it was just running and sitting there. (The message was) get up, and get after the lawn.”
On translating his Saskatchewan upbringing to coaching in the NHL
“I never wanted to let him (his father Bill) or my Mom (Bonnie) down. And I wanted to have some success to make them proud. Being a coach … you want to create that environment where the players want to play in the environment that you create. They want to play for you and for each other, instead of having to play for each other, the coach and GM.”
McLellan joined the Western League as a 16-year-old player, and dislocated his shoulder in his very first junior game. The Islanders drafted him in Round 5 of the 1986 draft, but he only played five NHL games.
“By the time I was done in New York I’d had three reconstructions of that shoulder,” he said. “I remember leaving Springfield, Mass. and not having any idea — no idea! — what I was going to do.”
He ended up playing in Holland where, after the team had fired its coach, McLellan had an open bed in his apartment. “The team was borderline bankrupt, they brought a guy named Doug McKay over to coach. My wife Debbie had gone home to plan our wedding, and the owner said, ‘Hey, can the coach move in?’ And that started the coaching thing.
“We would sit and talk tactics, who we’re playing next…. He needed me to help sell his program (to the other players), and I needed him because I didn’t have anyone there and it was fun talkin’ hockey.”
On what happened in San Jose
“It’s hard to win,” he muses, still not completely certain why, in his own words, the Sharks “never got over the top.”
“We lost to two teams that won the Stanley Cup — Chicago and L.A. — and we lost to Vancouver the year they went to the Stanley Cup,” he recites.
In seven years at San Jose he missed the playoffs once, last season, and got fired. He won’t go into the fiasco that the Sharks became when Joe Thornton was stripped of his captaincy, but our read is that he was not in favour of that move.
“Look, I’ve been in the league for 10 years. The best team I’ve ever been around as a coach was my first year in Detroit, when I was an assistant coach (in 2005-06). We had 58 wins that season,” he said. “We ran into the Edmonton Oilers in the playoffs and we lost. We won a Stanley Cup (in ’08). That team wasn’t near as talented or as good as the one we had in 2005-06.”
On what’s next
“This is a new phase of my life. I’m going to have some excess time, and I like speaking to groups,” said McLellan. Tyson is playing hockey in the USHL with a scholarship pending at Connecticut, and Cale is a talented high school golfer back in San Jose. Debbie is going to see him through high school golf in California, leaving McLellan alone in Edmonton with some extra time to embed himself in the community.
He’s already pledged an involvement in a charity called Sport Central, which furnishes needy kids with sports equipment, but that’s only a start.
“There is a responsibility to be involved, to give back,” McLellan said. “Ken Hitchcock has talked to me about being involved in Sport Central, which is great. I’ve heard about the Stollery (Children’s Hospital)… I want to be involved.”
Tomorrow: Part 2. McLellan, McDavid and an Oilers project that’s been a McFailure thus far.
