With their rookies heading off to London to participate in the annual rookie tournament, Senators head coach Paul MacLean was on TSN 1200’s ‘In the Box’ today to essentially serve everyone a reminder that the NHL season is just around the corner.
The interview itself isn’t really anything too noteworthy since the early portions of it were devoted to discussing Paul’s excitement to watch some hockey again this weekend. Making matters worse, technical difficulties led to two instances in which Paul’s calls were dropped. Eventually when matters were resolved, MacLean hit on a few topics that may be of interest to readers.
To listen to the full interview, you can click here or listen to the embedded audio at the bottom of the post.
As always, my thoughts are in bold.
On the personnel moves hiring Jason Smith as an assistant coach and Shean Donovan to help out with player development…
“Yeah, we just feel that the role of the coaching staffs in the NHL has continued to evolve and evolve and there’s so much that needs to get done. We need to make sure that we got everything covered ourselves. The biggest thing for me is that Jason came in and helped us out at the end of last year and really, I thought, had an impact with our young defencemen. And since we still have that crop of young defencemen, we felt that his expertise — he’s played over 1,000 NHL games — and the way that he played the game was an element that we were missing on your team and our defence. And we just felt that he would be able to come in and help us.”
Interesting comments from the coach regarding the organization’s recognition that staffs, like football or baseball, have to evolve become more specialized to put the players in a better position to succeed. So why is this interesting? Probably in large part because management, as relayed in an interview with Senators assistant GM Randy Lee, has indicated that it does not necessarily believe in hiring individuals for its front office who focus exclusively on analytics.
On what he wants to see from the group coming back this season…
“Well I think the most important thing that we want to see is the competition level. We just feel that the compete level of our team on a consistent basis, night after night, period to period, shift to shift, has to be way better than it was in the past – even to a point where in training camp and in the starting of the season, we almost want to be the point (of being) hyper-competitive. But at the same time, we want to have lots of enthusiasm. We want to enjoy coming to the rink. We want to enjoy our jobs and make sure that we’re here with enthusiasm to show our fans that we’re playing the game with enthusiasm and an intent to win.”
Compete is the word of the day, just ask Randy Lee.
On players who wanted the “old Paul MacLean” back and whether he changed his approach last year and if so, how?
“Well yeah, I made a conscious decision last year. I felt that I had to be more demanding as a coach in my third season in the league to have things done the way that I wanted them to be and not just accept or let the players just play hockey and see how things would go. Or just be more demanding of what I wanted and what my expectations were. When you look over the course of the year, that ended up being… it’s not the only reason why the team didn’t have some success, but I think it had an effect on the team. As a coach, you can’t be afraid to do things and you can’t be afraid to make changes to yourself and at the same time, you’ve got to be willing to, in order to see if it does work, you have to follow it through. And I thought that’s one thing that I did do – I carried it through to the end of the year. I evaluate it now at the end of the year and there has to be an adjustment of how demanding you are or how consistent you are, but also at the same time having some compassion and some understanding that players are still playing hockey. And at some point in time, the players have to be able to play hockey.”
I’d love for someone to dig a little deeper and find out why Paul felt so compelled that it was necessary for him to to evolve and change – especially when he’s had some relative success in his first two years that culminated with him winning the Jack Adams Award in 2013.
On whether the “old Paul” is back this season…
“Well I think there’s always going to be a hybrid or an in between. I think circumstances dictate it as well. We feel that we’ve had a whole lot of success being a coaching staff that was compassionate, taught the game and was understanding that the game was still playing hockey. You can’t always have it be a certain way. It’s not just a chess game where the pieces keep going in the same order type of thing. You have to understand that it’s liquid and fluid and be a little bit compassionate about it some time.”
Having watched the Senators play in their own defensive end, fans would probably settle for a little more accountability and chess-like structure.
On old Paul being an approach…
“It’s more to do with the approach and a lot of times, success has a lot to do with what it’s all about too. We didn’t have a whole lot of success and that changes things as well.”
Fair point, by the coach. If the Senators even just had an incremental bit more of success and snuck into the playoffs, this whole “old Paul” thing isn’t even a talking point.
On the chance that a captain won’t be named this season…
“Well, I’m a firm believer that every team needs a captain that’s a representative of the whole group. But at the same time, I’m also a big believer that you’ve got to do things at the right time. You have to have the right person. If in fact we don’t feel that we have the right person, we’ll move forward that way. But at this point in time, we feel that, in our leadership group, there is a lot of real good guys that we could name the captain easily and it wouldn’t be any issue. Nobody would have really an issue with it because the group is large and we just want to make sure that we get the right guy. I think doing it just to do it is not the right thing to do. I think we have to go through the same process that we went through last year before naming Jason (Spezza) the captain. We have to go through that process again and I still think we’re in the middle of that process and when it’s over, we’re going to name the captain.”
On believing that a captain will emerge from that process…
“I believe it will, but at the end of the day, if it doesn’t, I’m not going to really be too, too worried about it. I believe that on this team, leadership comes from everybody. And the guy that we name the captain and the two guys that get to wear the “A’s’ are just representatives of the team. The whole team has to lead. I have to lead. The assistant coaches have to lead. Everyone has to lead and that’s doing the right thing every day and that’s everybody. So the people that are going to represent that, first of all, Bryan Murray and I represent that as well as Eugene Melnyk, and from the players’ side, we’re going to have three guys represent it, but everyone on the team is expected to lead.”
My money is on Erik Karlsson.
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