Now that he has been nominated — again — for the Jack Adams Award as the NHL’s coach of the Year, maybe this is it.
After all, year-in and year-out, there is no better coach in the National Hockey League than Dauphin, Manitoba’s gift to the NHL, Nashville Predators bench boss, Barry Trotz.
For the sake of full disclosure, I am the president of the Barry Trotz fan club. I have, without apology, been campaigning for Trotz since the early 2000s. There is no better coach in the game.
And already this spring, he has proven it. First with a six-game victory over the Anaheim Ducks and now with a Round 2 Game 1 victory over the Vancouver Canucks IN Vancouver.
“I’m happy because I think of the resiliency of the group that worked so hard all year, and I’m relieved because there is a little bit of a cloud that we wanted to get to the next level,” Trotz told reporters after his Preds dispatched Anaheim. ”And if we never got there in this series, I think there would be a little bit of a carry-over.”
“We got help from everybody. Everybody contributed. That’s sort of what we do. That’s our DNA. To win this series, we needed everybody and everybody contributed.”
Certainly the country’s hockey mavens know the players who toil for Trotz. However, for the average hockey fan, the Preds are one of the game’s greatest collection of no-names. Nick Spaling, Marcel Goc, Matt Halischuk, Cal O’Reilly, Joel Ward, Colin Wilson, Kevin Klein (he’s an actor, isn’t he?), Shane O’Brien, Cody Franson, none of those guys conjures up thoughts of Sidney Crosby, Jonathan Toews, Alex Ovechkin or Joe Thornton. If the Preds have a “superstar” it’s Shea Weber and he’s a defenseman with 16 goals. The only forward with a “big” name, even in Nashville, is Martin Erat because he’s played his entire nine-year NHL career in Nashville. He had one more goal than Weber this season.
Call it odd, but the Nashville Predators didn’t realize what fame was until their general manager, David Poile (the only GM they’ve ever had), made a deal to acquire Mike Fisher. Fisher is a grinder who is only famous because he’s married to American Idol Carrie Underwood.
If there is a lunch bucket team in the NHL, it’s the Predators. And to their credit, they can all carry their lunch buckets into the second round of the playoffs for the first time in franchise history.
And the man who is truly responsible for this year’s success is a) the fiercest looking coach in the NHL and b) the nicest man in the game today.
Trotz is the only coach the Predators have ever had. He’s been in Nashville for the entire time the Preds have been the Preds. He has coached 985 consecutive games in Nashville. That’s the NHL record for most games coached from the start of a franchise’s history.
In fact, the 48-year-old Trotz, has been with the Predators since their inaugural season in 1998. His overall record is 455-398-60-71 and while that doesn’t sound like much, one must consider that the expansion Preds didn’t have a winning record until the 2003-04 season. However, since the 2004-05 lockout, Trotz’s Predators have gone 272-174-0-50 and on Sunday night, as the Preds reached the second round of the playoffs for the first time in history, it had become apparent that no coach in the NHL does as much with as little as Barry Trotz.
This past season, the best coach in the NHL coaxed his team to a 44-27-11 record, fifth in the West. He’s now taken out the No. 4 team in the conference and won’t know his team’s next opponent until, at least, tomorrow.
Trotz, who was born in Dauphin, spent three seasons with the Western Hockey League’s Regina Pats and then went to the University of Manitoba where he still believed he could make it to the NHL one day. Trouble was, he’d been injured in the off-season when he was 19 and the pain just wouldn’t go away.
“I hurt my back in the summer of 1982 and it just never got better,” Trotz told me in 1999. “It was my lower-back and I tried to play through the pain for a year at the U of M, but I just couldn’t do it. It got so bad that I could barely walk. With some rest, I tried to go out to training camp the next year, hoping I could get back by Christmas, but I had nothing. It wasn’t coming around and then one day, the head coach at the U of M, Wayne Fleming, asked me to become his assistant.”
The next season Trotz took over as coach and general manager of his hometown Manitoba Junior Hockey League club, the Dauphin Kings, but then moved back to the U of M as a 26-year-old head coach while Fleming went to Europe on a sabbatical. When Fleming returned, Trotz stayed on as his assistant and picked up a side job as a regional scout with the Washington Capitals.
In 1990, the Capitals asked him to join their farm team, the Baltimore Skipjacks of the AHL as an assistant and Trotz jumped at the chance. He eventually became the team’s head coach and when the Skipjacks folded, he took a job as head coach of the AHL franchise in Portland, Me. There, he won a Calder Cup, and when his old boss, former Caps GM Poile became the first GM of the Nashville Predators, he immediately hired Trotz as his first head coach.
They have seldom missed a day together since.
“Barry is the fairest-minded, most honest coach in the game,” Poile once said. “His players love him and will do anything for him because there are no mind games, no favorites, no phoniness. Barry Trotz is a very good human being and as a result, an extremely good coach.”
Indeed. And now, maybe, just maybe, this year he’ll finally be recognized as the best coach in the National Hockey League.
(Portions of this updated post originally appeared at www.fantrax.com)