‘The bar napkins took a beating.’ Building Canada’s lineup is the 4 Nations’ toughest and best job

Credit: Team Canada coach Jon Cooper

“The Bar napkins took a beating,” Jon Cooper said.

And that was just when he was fiddling with imaginary Canada roster ideas before the team was actually named.

Figuring out how to deploy the talent on a roster full of generational legends, Hart Trophy winners, scoring champions, Conn Smythe Trophy winners and Norris Trophy winners was difficult enough in the early brainstorming phase. But when Canada team lead Doug Armstrong and GM Don Sweeney finally handed head coach Cooper his official roster for the 4 Nations Face-Off in early December, that’s when the true challenge began.

There’s a reason Cooper was the right choice for the job. As a two-time Stanley Cup winner and four-time finalist behind the Tampa Bay Lightning bench, he’s dealt with star-studded teams his entire career. He’s had to sort through roles and power-play deployments for the likes of Nikita Kucherov, Steven Stamkos, Victor Hedman, Brayden Point and so many more. But figuring out how to break down Team Canada – a task he was robbed of when he was supposed to coach at the 2022 Olympics before COVID-19 forced the NHL out – requires even more guile than Cooper has had to muster before.

For him, the key was to make the process collaborative. With a team full of leaders and/or captains, from Connor McDavid to Sidney Crosby to Nathan MacKinnon to Drew Doughty, the unselfishness factor was always going to be high, and the feedback would be valuable. So Cooper used an open-door approach in figuring out the deployments heading into Game 1 of the tournament Wednesday night at Bell Centre.

“Communication with the players was a big thing for me in how we see them from the outside and how they see themselves, and then talking it through and what they feel they need,” Cooper told Daily Faceoff. “And sometimes you have a disagreement. ‘Well, we don’t feel like you need this.’ And he feels like he needs this. And you talk things through. And in the end, you come to a consensus of what’s good for guys.”

One example: finally giving Crosby a chance to play a best-on-best game on a line with his longtime friend and fellow Cole Harbour, N.S., native Nathan MacKinnon, with Crosby making the unprecedented shift to the left wing.

“[The discussion] was pretty general, yeah, so there’s typical questions, where your comfort level is playing different spots,” Crosby told Daily Faceoff. “And they were throwing out different possibilities. But until you get here and get organized and everything gets solidified, you don’t necessarily know. But even when you’re looking at it before the tournament, you know there’s certain possibilities and I knew it was a possibility of playing with Nate. So I just tried to prepare myself that way.”

The double edged sword of having such tremendous depth, particularly at forward, is forcing frontline players into smaller roles. Cooper’s own 50-goal scorer from Tampa, Point, is a third-liner. Playmaking maven Mitch Marner will toil on the second power play unit. But there’s really no “bad” linemate for a team with an embarrassment of riches.

“There wasn’t a line when we put them up a couple days ago where guys were like, ‘I can’t believe I’m playing with him,’ ” Cooper said. “It’s more like, ‘I can’t believe I’m playing with him!’ And that’s the excitement you want.”

The challenge doesn’t end after the lines are built and agreed upon, however. You’re playing a minimum of three games and, if you reach the Final, a maximum of four. You’ve crafted a roster deployment you believe will gel quickly, but there’s no way to know if it will when many of the players haven’t worked together before. Does that mean a coach needs to be experimental and fluid in a short tournament, changing things up if he doesn’t like what he sees? Or is there no choice but to trust what you’ve built and give players a chance to find chemistry, lest you drive yourself crazy tinkering?

“I hope we got it right, and that’s it, you don’t have to change, but I anticipate that probably won’t be the case,” Cooper said. “In your own NHL teams, sometimes you change lines just because the momentum in a game needs to be swung or you feel something in your gut’s telling you to do this. But in a short tournament, you also have to give them some leash. You can’t cut them off the knees two shifts in. So there’s going to be a balance here to see how the game’s going. But we like the group we have assembled, we like the lines we’ve put together, and the players like the lines, so that’s half the battle there.”

Further highlighting why Cooper was so suited to this job: he’s determined not to be too hands on. He has a team of big personalities and future Hall of Famers. He doesn’t want to make things about him. He wants to place the pieces on the chessboard, let them move freely and only adjust them if he has to. We’ll find out in the next eight days if it’s a winning formula.

“As a coach, so much preparation has gone into this, and it’s just, I can’t believe it’s here now, because it seems like it’s taken forever to get to this international event,” Cooper said. “But your job as a coach is not to get in the way. Put the players in the best position to succeed, give them the information that’s needed, but don’t get in their way and don’t cloud the minds of the best players in the world, and that’s it. When decisions have to be made, be assertive and do it. But you’ve really ultimately got to let the guys play.”

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‘The bar napkins took a beating.’ Building Canada’s lineup is the 4 Nations’ toughest and best job

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