With skates and sticks locked in a closet, the Avalanche is closed for the season.
Patrick Roy walks in a hockey arena tonight with a championship on the line.
Roy lives to win.
“I never feel like my team is going to lose a game,” Roy said Saturday. “Never.”
That is why the Avs need Roy to be the franchise’s next general manager.
Want to win? Take a gamble. Make a bold move. Hire Roy.
The Avalanche needs to be rebuilt, because there is too little talent on the team bench between 36-year-old Joe Sakic and young rookie Marek Svatos.
At age 58, Pierre Lacroix has lost the all-encompassing, obsessive desire to live and breathe hockey 24/7.
On Friday, he stopped trying to summon the passion. Lacroix was one of the last casualties of the NHL lockout. The thrill was gone for more than a year, when a season to lost labor strife so shook his faith in the sport that Lacroix almost quit early in 2005.
His resignation, a self-imposed phase-out that will allow Lacroix to retain the title as team president, was not shocking to anyone paying attention.
“I could say I’m 58 and I’m 88 inside,” said Lacroix, weary after tirelessly working to make Colorado one of the premier franchises in all of pro sports for the better part of the past decade.
Lacroix never does anything without deep reflection, and leaves nothing to chance. He treats hockey with the love of a family business. Roy said he believes Lacroix has been grooming an apprentice to take over the business.
Ask the odds-on favorite to be named GM of the Avs, and, without hesitation, Roy says: “Michel Goulet.”
Goulet, whose prowess as a left wing earned him a well-deserved place in the Hall of Fame, has worked in the Avalanche’s personnel department since 1995. Without doubt, Goulet has the trust of Lacroix, who will hand-pick his successor.
In the new NHL, however, old-time hockey rules no longer apply and conventional wisdom is not enough to win championships.
Hire Roy.
The Stanley Cup is engraved with Roy’s name four times, twice as goalie for the Avalanche.
So I asked Roy: Doesn’t he thirst for another sip of champagne from Lord Stanley’s Cup?
“Today? I am not looking for something else. I am happy with what I am doing now,” Roy replied. “But tomorrow? I don’t know. I might have the temptation to get back to the highest level and compete in the NHL.”
Hours before the crowd arrives for a big playoff game, anticipation fills the empty arena with tension as real as the chill radiating from the ice.
Roy loves that feeling.
It has been five years since the Avs won the Stanley Cup, and a franchise that has lost its swagger could use a healthy dose of Roy’s unshakable confidence.
Roy has been tested by uncommon adversity this year, watching as his mother recovered from a flesh-eating virus that forced amputation of an arm.
“At one point, the doctors feared she would lose more than an arm. They were afraid she might not make it,” Roy said. “What’s amazing is not just that she is alive, but how she deals with living with one arm. It’s inspiring.”
No. 33 always will make Roy feel lucky. But the uniform St. Patrick wears to the rink now is the dark blue suit and green tie of a coach.
His current team is the Quebec Remparts, a major junior club for which Roy calls almost every shot. At season’s outset, his title was general manager and co-owner, but he could not stay away from bench, taking over as coach when the team started slowly.
“It was a little too slow for me on the second floor,” Roy said. “I needed to be closer to the ice.”
While sitting on the far eastern edge of Canada, where his team will play the Moncton Wildcats tonight in Game 6 of the league’s championship series, the 40-year-old Roy modestly insists he has more hockey to learn before tackling a job as tough as general manager of the Avalanche.
“That job is not in my vision right now,” Roy said.
In the history of Denver sports, no sports executive has ever made more boldly effective personnel moves than Lacroix, who caused Colorado to fall in love with hockey all over again.
Lacroix had the vision to bring Roy to town in the first place.
It is time to bring Roy – and the glory – back to the Avalanche.
Staff writer Mark Kiszla can be reached at 303-820-5438 or mkiszla@denverpost.com.
