Ted Nolan to the Pens?? [Archive]

Shell

08-01-2003, 03:15 PM

Nolan's situatiion (coughblackballcough) came up several times before the crash, so thought I would post this in case anyone is interested...

Nolan’s new perspective focused on aboriginal youth
by JEFF KORENKO
A Whitehorse Star Archive story originally published July 31, 2003

For Ted Nolan, having the conviction to stand up for what he believes in has been a double-edged sword.

The character trait was the main reason he went from growing up as the third-youngest of 12 siblings on an Ontario reservation to playing in the National Hockey League and later winning the Jack Adams Trophy as the league’s Coach of the Year in June 1997.

It is also the most viable explanation as to why he was abruptly dismissed as the Buffalo Sabres’ head coach less than a month later.

Nolan’s second season behind the Sabres’ bench in 1996-97 saw the squad enjoy a 23-point improvement from the previous year and a Northeast Division title.

Despite the team’s success, rumours abounded that Nolan didn’t get along with then Sabres’ GM John Muckler and star netminder Dominik Hasek.
Muckler was fired at the end of the season and new GM Darcy Regier presented Nolan with a one-year contract offer about an hour before a scheduled news conference.

Nolan knew what this meant. The offer was clearly a slap in the face and he would not put himself into a situation where he would be merely a lame duck coach.

Believing that what he and the team had just accomplished was worth a more secure offer, he turned Regier down.

He has not coached professionally since.

Six years have passed and Nolan, who is in town to take part in the Summit Hockey School going on at Stan McCowan Arena this week, said last night he still has no regrets about the way he handled the situation.
“I wouldn’t change a thing,” he offered in a personal interview last night, moments before he was to speak at a gathering at the Nkataku Potlatch House in the Kwanlin Dun First Nation.

Beyond the perceived rift with Muckler, rumours as far fetched that Nolan showed up late and hung over during his time with the team and that he even slept with Hasek’s wife, surfaced.

“What was hard to accept was the things that were said about what went on (in Buffalo),” he said. “If I couldn’t coach, so be it. But, the rumours went beyond that, to the point they called my integrity into question.”
Shortly after not returning to Buffalo, he was offered the head coaching position with the Tampa Bay Lightning, but didn’t want to move his family of four to Florida.

Nolan then spent the next couple of years mired in wondering why another concrete offer from the NHL never surfaced.

During that stretch, he teetered on the edge of depression, he admitted last evening.

He later came to accept that what happens in terms of a return to the NHL is out of his hands.

He has, however, been offered all types of jobs at the junior and minor-pro level.

“I do care if I coach (in the NHL) again, but I’ve come to know that I don’t have any control over that,” he surmised.

“It wasn’t my goal to get into the NHL to begin with, but I had some success (in junior hockey) and then the NHL calls.

“What I’m doing now is just as important to me as any of the time I spent coaching.”

Now a much sought-after motivational speaker, Nolan has also been hard at work bringing the Ted Nolan Foundation to life.

The foundation — which Nolan said is expecting to receive between $3-$5 million in funding from the federal government in the coming months — will continue to support the positive development of aboriginal youth across Canada.

Over the past year, he has spent about 250 days doing exactly what he did last evening; speaking to youth — aboriginal or otherwise — about things such as the importance of having dreams.

“What I try to impart on kids has nothing to do with promoting hockey or becoming a professional athlete,” Nolan proclaimed.

“Just be a good person. I like to use examples of overcoming life obstacles.”

Because, he continued, for many aboriginal kids, there is much more to trying to aspire as an athlete.

There is alcoholism and drug use; the fridge is empty; families fight, Nolan stated. Many kids give in to the pressures enveloping them and either follow the pattern or commit suicide.

Nolan speaks not only from the heart, but from experience.
As a child, his small house on the Garden River First Nation — located just east of Sault St. Marie — didn’t have electricity or plumbing.
He played hockey on the ponds there with his brothers and some of his friends, but the majority of the kids he knew spent their time glue-sniffing, huffing nail polish or drinking beer and wine.

He admitted to getting caught up in the peer pressure and succumbing to it on a couple of occasions as a youngster.

After he woke up one day and told himself that wasn’t what he wanted in his life, ridicule and even physical confrontation from those peers followed.
He was told hockey would take him nowhere and he was wasting his time.
Getting beaten up at times for not doing the things his friends were doing was better than becoming addicted to something, Nolan related last evening.

After making it to the junior ranks and playing two years in the then Ontario Hockey Association for the Greyhounds in the Soo — he played a year with Wayne Gretzky — Nolan was drafted 78th overall by the Detroit Red Wings in the 1978 NHL amateur draft.

During an eight-year professional career, Nolan played 78 NHL games for the Wings and Pittsburgh Penguins, scoring six goals and adding 16 assists.

The basic premise to what he tells youngsters today is that if he made it into the NHL, anything is possible.

He opened his 30-minute speech in front of about 100 people gathered at the potlatch house by talking about how he wasn’t anywhere near the best skater or biggest guy on any team he was ever on.

“I couldn’t shoot the puck from this wall to the other,” he said with a chuckle while pointing to the far end of the room.
But, he said, he never gave up.

He recalled how he played his first game in New York’s Madison Square Garden and thought that they could fit eight reserves in the building.
Stuff like that really helped him to remember where he came from, Nolan told the gathering.

He was forced to retire from the Penguins in 1986 with a back injury.
In 1988, he was offered an assistant coaching position with the Soo Greyhounds and by the end of the 88-89 season, he was promoted to head coach.

The next year, the team won only 18 of its 66 games and finished dead last.

“I didn’t know anything about being a head coach when I took that job,” Nolan admitted. “I wasn’t a very good coach, but I learned to be by learning from the people around me.”

The next season, the Greyhounds finished 42-21-3 and went to the Memorial Cup.

The team got beat pretty bad at the national junior hockey championship, but learned from the experience, Nolan explained.

In ’91-92, the team enjoyed its best regular season ever under Nolan, posting a .667 winning percentage, with a 41-19-6 mark.

Another trip to the Memorial Cup followed and the Greyhounds lost by a goal in the championship game.

Nolan and Sault St. Marie finally reached their goal by capturing the 1993 Memorial Cup title.

Two seasons later, he took an assistant coaching job with the Hartford Whalers — now the Carolina Hurricanes — at the start of the 1994-95 campaign.

That brought him to Buffalo.
Described as the ultimate players’ coach, he managed to get the most out of a team that was regarded as having minimal talent.
Over the next two seasons the team was often spoken of as the hardest working squad in the league.

Having turned the team’s fortunes around in one year, Nolan was awarded the Jack Adams Trophy as the league’s top coach.
It’s an honour that epitomizes the theory that coaches are hired to be fired; some winners haven’t lasted long enough to see the end of the next season with the same team.

Nolan never saw the start. But, he seems okay with where his life is taking him these days.

Over the past 20 years, he has visited with youth from more than half of the 633 native bands in this country.

He has overcome other obstacles other than the stereotypical ones aboriginal youth face. He also lost his mother Rose, who was killed by a drunk driver in 1981.

Nolan has set up an annual golf tournament in the Soo in her honor to raise money for education for aboriginal women.

Nolan has been married for 23 years and has two sons — Brandon, 20 and Jordan, 14.

Brandon was recently selected in the fourth round of this summer’s NHL Entry Draft by the Vancouver Canucks.

His son’s path to an everyday job in the NHL will be a lot more smooth than his was, Nolan said last night.

As he concluded his talk last evening, he spoke of how he was able to win the Jack Adams Trophy.

The Sabres were stuck in a three-game losing slump and while in Detroit, a player asked Nolan where he was from.

When Nolan told the player he was from Garden River, the player asked if there ever was a medicine man there.

Nolan told him that there indeed was and knowing that the gentleman in question was in Detroit, he asked him to come to the team’s practice that day.

Nolan’s friend came to the Sabres workout and was asked by forward Matthew Barnaby — who wasn’t scoring much at the time — to sprinkle some medicine on his stick.

Barnaby scored that night and showed up at Nolan’s hotel room door after the game looking for more.

When he scored the next night, he returned with two other Sabres.
A few games later, the number of believers had grown to about seven, so Nolan decided that the team should put all their sticks in the middle of the dressing room before the game and he would impart the same ritual on them.

“I turned off all the lights and lit some candles and started dancing around the sticks and throwing this powder on them,” Nolan related to a chorus of laughter.

The coach only knew a few sentences in his native language. One happened to be “feed the dog.”
But, he chanted it anyway.

“We went on a streak where we won something like 17 or our next 19 games,” Nolan said. “I wanted to tell you this story because people thought we changed a bunch of systems.

“But, all it had to do with was belief.”