With the lessons of Turin in mind, Mike Babcock's coaching staff is determined to prevent history from repeating itself.
CALGARY – In a game that has given us more than our fair share of men who act as if they invented the game, Mike Babcock has never followed the Ron Wilsons and Mike Keenans down the path of self righteousness.
Despite the fact he has won a Stanley Cup, been to two finals in a row, and now heads up perhaps the most important team in this great hockey country’s history, Babcock manages to stay humble.
So when you ask the head coach about his assistants, he doesn’t just tell you what roles they have been given. Because that would make him sound like he is in charge, like the coaching staff isn’t the team effort he wants it to be.
"To be a coach and to want to get better, you have to surround yourself with smart people. These guys are smart guys, bring a lot of wisdom, have done a lot of winning," begins Babcock.
So when he put together his Team Canada staff he called Columbus head coach Ken Hitchcock, a veteran of two Olympics and the World Cup, veteran New Jersey head coach Jacques Lemaire, and the NHL coach with the longest running tenure, 12-year Buffalo Sabres head coach Lindy Ruff.
"Hitch is in charge of all faceoff schemes, in charge of all the pre-scouts and the post-scouts, and he’ll be our eye in the sky," Babcock said. "Jacques is in charge of our penalty kill, and he’s going to be with me on the bench, matchup-wise. Lindy is going to run the power play, and he’ll run the D on the back."
Hitchcock is the experience guy. He’ll see hurdles coming long before they arrive, and after the disaster that was Turin, his experience can already be seen in the size of this camp.
"The biggest mistakes we made?" Hitchcock said of Turin, "we didn’t look close enough at the next wave (of younger players). The second thing was, we took over a lot of players who were banged up. And after two games, they were really banged up. Looking back on it, we should have brought healthier players.
"We had two players who basically went from ice bucket to skate to play. That was tough on those guys, and made for a tough evaluation, because those guys were trying, they knew we were short on the back end and they were trying to help us."
Chris Pronger was playing on a broken foot, while Wade Redden had a bad groin. With this orientation camp expanded to 46 players, the health of all 23 players eventually chosen to go to Vancouver will be closely scrutinized come February. With more players having been part of this camp, it will be easier to have a roster of 100 percent healthy players.
In all the years that Lemaire has been around this game, he has never had a call from Team Canada.
"I only played in exhibition games against the Russians, in 1975, New Years Eve," he said. "Only these types of games. I never played for Team Canada. I remember in ’72, I was disappointed. But there were a lot of good players."
Somehow Lemaire ended up on Babcock’s staff, after some pestering by the Detroit head coach.
"Once in a while he’d call me. Probably once a year," Lemaire was saying this week. "He even asked me lately to sit down for a few hours, because he knew maybe I would retire. ‘Maybe we could sit and chat about the game?’ I said, ‘Oh, I don’t want that.’ Now, he’s got me.’"
Between them all, their ability to function smoothly under the intense pressure of Vancouver can not be questioned.
Babcock is coming off of his second straight Cup final — and a seventh game to boot.
Ruff coached against Hitchcock back in 1999, when Game 6 of the Sabres-Dallas Stars final went into triple OT, before Brett Hull scored the winning goal with his foot in Dominik Hasek’s crease.
Then there is Lemaire, the former Montreal Canadiens centre who sweated out that 1975 New Year’s Eve game against the Red Army, sometimes refereed to as the greatest game ever played.
"There are games that you play at different times in your life, that I’m sure it’s the same thing," he said of the pressure he is expecting in Vancouver. "New Years Eve, I remember the guys were all dressed up a half hour before the warm-up, walking in the room. If there is more pressure than that, we’ll need the paramedics."
"The (Olympic) games are so intense," Hitchcock said. "The experience of coaching in the Stanley Cup playoffs when it really gets rich, I think that experience is really valuable. Because there’s a sense of desperation on the ice that, until you‘ve been there and done it and played in those competitions, it almost overwhelms you.
"There’s nothing like either a sudden-death game or a game where every shift feels like the last shift. To me, the richest game I’ve ever coached in was the overtime game in the World Cup against the Czechs."
It will be even "richer" in Vancouver, of that you can be sure.
With this much experience behind the Team Canada bench, it is hard to think they won’t be able to handle whatever gets thrown Canada’s way.
