Playoff Coaching: You’d better believe it’s an acquired skill
As we watched the clock tick down on the Florida Panthers’ season and the camera panned to head coach Andrew Brunette vigorously chewing gum behind the defeated Panther bench, it was difficult to reconcile that grim visage with the man who led the Panthers to their first Presidents’ Trophy and a spot on the Jack Adams Award ballot as coach of the year.
As Brunette prepared to shake hands with counterpart and Tampa Bay Lightning head coach Jon Cooper and his staff after the prolific Panthers had been unceremoniously swept from the second round by the Bolts, it was a stark reminder that, just as it is for players, the playoffs are an entirely different beast, and those who aren’t prepared for that are soon cast aside.
Maybe Brunette will win the Jack Adams, although our money is on Darryl Sutter in Calgary. But if Brunette does win the award, it’ll be a constant, painful reminder of the brutal lessons Brunette and the Panthers learned as they scuffled their way through a six-game series victory over Washington in the first round and then were humiliated by Tampa. The Panthers, the highest-scoring regular season team in a generation, scored three times in four games against Tampa.
This isn’t a screed against Brunette, who took over for disgraced head coach Joel Quenneville when Quenneville was forced to resign early in the season in the wake of the Kyle Beach sexual assault scandal.
Brunette did yeoman’s work and he’s full value for his spot on the Jack Adams ballot. But there’s a reason that no Jack Adams Trophy winner has won a Stanley Cup in the same year since 2004 when John Tortorella in Tampa accomplished the feat. In fact, not only was Tortorella the last Jack Adams winner to also have his name inscribed on the Cup in the same year, but he is one of only three coaches to achieve that rare daily double since the Jack Adams was first handed out in 1974, the others being Fred Shero in 1974 and Scotty Bowman in 1977.
The reason is quite simple. The regular season, while necessary is totally irrelevant when it comes to coaching in the playoffs, and if you can’t elevate your coaching game, your team cannot hope to elevate its game to the necessary level come playoff time and you’re doomed.
Easy to say, but what does that mean, exactly?
Let’s start with Tortorella, who seems destined to return to an NHL bench next season, perhaps with the Philadelphia Flyers. We chatted with the two-time Jack Adams winner (he also won in Columbus in 2017) and when he thinks back to the coaching he did in 2004, it’s a different world.
Then, he said, it was all X’s and O’s and scheme, and that was the focal point of coaching.
“Back in ’04, we were dotting every ‘I,’ crossing every ‘T’ on concept and structure,” Tortorella said.
But now everyone has analytics staff, and structure and scheme are not some secret recipe – they’re available to all around the hockey world.
Instead, Tortorella said, it’s about mindset. The game is younger, faster and the mistakes are aplenty, so do you have a team that believes in the game plan produced by the coaching staff that will allow them to ride out those mistakes and to take advantage of the mistakes made by an opponent on a regular basis?
He pointed to defending Jack Adams winner Rod Brind’Amour of the Carolina Hurricanes as a coach who he believes has his team in the correct mindset.
“You have to get your team in a mental state of belief, and that’s not X’s and O’s,” Tortorella said. “Your arrogance level, your swagger.”
Where does that come from? Well, that’s the trick, because, as a coaching staff, you have spent an entire regular season hammering that into your team, and often it’s the coaching staff versus the players to get them to buy in at that level, Tortorella said.
Come the playoffs, when it’s time to put that all to the test, the mindset for everyone has to pivot to the greater good of the group.
“I tell my players this,” Tortorella said. “We spend 82 games where it’s coaching staff and players and we’re trying to kick, punch, spit, push, tug, bite, whatever you want to do to get you to play every night in the regular season. It’s not an even playing ground. It’s the staff and the players.”
But the moment you start preparing for the playoffs?
“Now it’s a different dynamic,” said Tortorella. “We’re in it together. We’re with you now. We’re going to do this together. I want them to understand that right away. It’s us now. It’s coaches and players. It’s ‘us,’ it’s ‘we.’ ”
You can afford to have patience in the regular season. The key in the playoffs is understanding that patience is more a luxury and that by their very nature every playoff series is shot through with a sense of urgency.
We remember a conversation with Cooper about his first playoff experience and getting swept by Montreal, and the feeling of things spiralling out of control and seemingly in the blink of an eye, it was over. You work for six months during the regular season and then it was over in a week. Done.
That’s why, for Tortorella, in-series coaching adjustments are often gut decisions.
“To me it’s a feel. You need to feel your team. And your team needs to be selfless here,” Tortorella said. “To me that is done totally by feel, not with a hockey handbook.”
Tortorella wouldn’t identify the team, but he recalled this playoff year watching the body language of a player who had seen his role especially vis a vis his team’s power play diminished. He was not happy and it showed.
“If you start going down that road, you are not going to win. You will not. It’s impossible,” Tortorella said.
This reasoning jibes with a recent conversation we had with Claude Julien, who won a Jack Adams in 2009 two years before he and his Boston Bruins would win their first Cup since 1972. A little twist of fate for the purposes of this discussion: it was Pittsburgh head coach Dan Bylsma who earned Jack Adams honors in 2011 while it was Bylsma and the Pittsburgh Penguins who won the Cup in 2009.
Julien took time out from preparing for Team Canada’s successful run at the World Championship in Finland to talk about what he feels is a key in meeting the challenge of playoff coaching. And that is: not just having the belief to make changes during a series but also making sure the team understands why those changes are being made.
During the regular season you can take the long view on progress or you can take a long view on goals, whether it’s in terms of players in and out of the lineup, line combinations, defensive pairings, ice time. All of that.
“When you’re in the playoffs, you can’t think that way,” Julien said. “You’ve got to be in the moment. I think the other part, too, as a coach, your players really have to feel that you’re in control and that you know what you’re doing and there’s no panic. They need to feel that from you.”
Part of that is in the messaging. It can’t be about punishing players even though that might be exactly what you’re doing as a coach.
For instance, if you’re making a change on the power play alignment, the message has to be that against this opponent we believe that this player in this position allows us a better chance at success.
Julien recalled that, in his first playoff year with the Bruins, he benched a young Phil Kessel early in what would be a seven-game series loss to Montreal, and Kessel responded by scoring three goals in his first two games back in the lineup.
It took a long time for the Panthers to make changes to a power-play unit that was dynamite (tied for fourth overall during the regular season) during the regular season and yet the impotence of the Panthers’ power play in the playoffs was a key factor in the team’s early exit, registering just one man-advantage goal on 31 opportunities in 10 games.
Sometimes lineup decisions are made based on the style of play the opponent represents.
Julien recalled people asking why tough-as-nails Shawn Thornton was out of the Boston lineup early in its 2011 Stanley Cup run. In part it was that Julien didn’t feel the physicality of some series required Thornton’s presence. But after Nathan Horton was injured and Thornton returned to the lineup against Vancouver in the final he played an integral role in the Bruins erasing 2-0 and 3-2 series deficits en route to a Cup win.
Sometimes, though, you don’t learn about those kinds of decisions until you’ve been confronted with them in real time, and sometimes that means failing. Julien said he had the luxury of learning hard playoff lessons during his career as a junior and minor pro coach.
“We talk about players and it’s the same thing with coaches. There’s nothing better than experience,” Julien said. But how do you get that? You go through those experiences. And the second part is that you hope you’re coaching in the NHL because you have good instincts and a good hockey mind.”
Rick Tocchet was on the bench as part of Mike Sullivan’s staff during back-to-back Cup runs in Pittsburgh in 2016 and 2017 before taking on the head coaching job in Arizona. Like Tortorella and Julien, Tocchet is expected to garner significant interest from the teams looking to fill vacant head coaching positions this off-season.
In both the Cup years, the Penguins knocked off archrival Washington in the second round. In one of those matchups, Tocchet recalled how Washington’s forecheck was disrupting Pittsburgh’s breakout late in the series.
Between periods of one of those critical games, Sullivan took his staff to the coaches’ room and they came up with a plan on the spot to reverse their breakout by rimming the puck the opposite way. It created several odd-man rushes and at least one critical goal.
“Well, it worked great,” Tocchet said. “I thought it was brilliant because it was something we could give to the players because we were under siege. And they were, ‘Okay, we get it.’ ”
As Tocchet prepares for what, in all likelihood, will be a new head coaching assignment from his perch as a member of TNT’s national broadcast panel, he has watched closely teams like St. Louis and Tampa that have come from behind to win series this spring.
He noted changes Craig Berube has made in his lines and in his game plan after losing Game 1 of the second round against a star-studded Colorado team.
He attacked what the team did wrong and he gave them a game plan to correct those issues, Tocchet said.
“I think that energizes a team,” said Tocchet, who also won a Stanley Cup with Pittsburgh as a player in 1992. “You can’t just say, ‘You’re not working hard enough.’ ”
Tocchet admitted one of the things he needed to learn as he grew into his coaching identity was to control his own emotions on the bench during stressful situations. He likens it to being the pilot of a plane and if the cockpit door is open and the passengers – the players – are looking in an seeing the pilots freaking out during a time of turbulence, well, that’s not great. But if they see pilots handling the turbulence with calmness and rational thought, they’ll take their cues from that.
“It’s like, okay, they’re calm, I’m calm,” Tocchet said.
Back to Florida and what will be a long summer of wondering how they failed to measure up and the team that disposed of them, the Tampa Bay Lightning.
Head coach Cooper, who has never won a Jack Adams Award, was asked following the sweep of Florida what his team had learned back in 2019 when Tortorella’s Columbus Blue Jackets swept the 62-win Bolts in the first round. Well, Cooper said with a grin, they haven’t lost a series since.
Perhaps Brunette will one day have the opportunity answer a similar question with a similar response about the lessons learned the hard way in the spring of ’22.
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