I’ve been to Hawkesbury, Ontario, and seen Atlanta Thrashers coach Bob Hartley’s haunts, including:
The shuttered Canadian International Paper mill where he went to work on his 18th birthday, following the death of his father, Royal. Bob had to abandon his plans to attend college and become a special-education teacher.
The PPG of Canada windshield factory on the other side of town, where Hartley caught on after the paper mill closed.
The white brick house on Rhue Gislain he bought at age 19 while planning to marry his fiancée, Micheline. The real-estate agent asked Hartley, who arrived for the appointment on his bicycle, when his parents were going to show up.
And the local rink and recreation center where he played and began his coaching career as a volunteer goaltending coach for the local Junior B team, while still working at the windshield factory. That arena now is named after him.
I’ve been asked a lot why the Denver media seemed so enamored of Hartley, who was the coach of the Avalanche’s 2001 Stanley Cup championship team. Much of it is an appreciation of how he climbed through the ranks, beginning as a volunteer goaltending coach for the Junior B Hawkesbury Hawks.
His December 2002 exit here was the rare firing that came amid little media or fan speculation about the coach’s security. The Avs organization got caught up in a counterproductive obsession to continue a relatively insignificant divisional championship streak, saw it slipping away in a 10-8-9-4 start, panicked, and overreacted. Quebec hired Hartley out of major junior to be an assistant at its American Hockey League affiliate, and the Avs gave him his head coaching chances at Hershey (Pa.) and Colorado, and Hartley always keeps that in mind.
“It’s lots of good memories, obviously,” Hartley said Thursday, a few hours before Atlanta routed the Avs 6-3. “Is there a good way to be fired? I don’t know. It’s only happened once to me, and I guess it didn’t end on a good note. On the other hand, Denver’s a very special place for me. There’s no way someone who saw me when I was wearing my toe-capped boots and safety goggles would have said, ‘In 2001, you’re going to win the Stanley Cup.’ I definitely would have called the doctor, and he wouldn’t have been a foot doctor. Everything fell in the right place and I don’t regret a thing.”
The irony now is that the Thrashers – behind Marian Hossa and the electric Ilya Kovalchuk – are a lock to make the playoffs for the first time; the Avalanche’s postseason hopes are just about history. Hartley goes out of his way to make sure that Curt Fraser, the Thrashers’ original coach and his predecessor, gets some of the credit for helping out the foundation.
“I look at Nashville, and I’m so happy for (coach) Barry Trotz,” Hartley said. “It’s not very often an expansion coach can collect his dues. Lindy Ruff, even though Buffalo’s not an expansion team, had a couple of rough years there and look at them now. It goes to show you we don’t go dumb overnight. We don’t take a pill and wake up the next morning, and we’re dumb.”
Since Hartley took over, the Thrashers have filled in some of the cracks, adding veteran leadership in Greg de Vries, Slava Kozlov, Bobby Holik, Steve Rucchin and Scott Mellanby, and got Hossa for Dany Heatley, who needed to move on because he was behind the wheel in the tragic auto accident that led to the death of teammate Dan Snyder. If they can come up with a puck-moving defenseman capable of quarterbacking the power play, they’ll be even more of a threat in the Eastern side of the playoff draw.
Hartley is 2-0 in Denver as an opposing coach, but he wasn’t going to gloat.
“When you work for a great organization like this, and work in a great city like this, you don’t come in to make anyone look bad,” he said. “You come in to get business done and tonight we did.”
He also couldn’t help but notice only two players on the Avalanche roster – Joe Sakic and Milan Hejduk – played for him.
“They’re in a phase right now, but you look at (Wojtek) Wolski, (Paul) Stastny, (John-Michael) Liles – they’re building again on very solid ground,” he said.
Bet on Bettman
NHL commissioner Gary Bettman attended a Canucks game in Vancouver last week and at a news conference scoffed at speculation he would resign or be forced out in the near future.
He has taken deserved criticism for not convincing the league’s board of governors to abandon the ridiculous current scheduling format, and for the Versus cable television deal, among other things.
But while many folks don’t want to accept this, Bettman still has a major power base among the league’s owners for shepherding the league through the lockout and obtaining the save-the-owners-from-themselves (or idiot-proof) salary cap.
For the record, a touch of class
It was a nice touch for the Avalanche to bring in two of Tim Horton’s daughters for the pregame ceremony honoring Karlis Skrastins’ record-setting 487th consecutive game Thursday night. And the side-by-side pictures of Horton, killed in a 1974 auto accident, and Skrastins presented to the Avalanche defenseman acknowledged their dual roles in history and accomplishments. For the record, Skrastins also received a copy of “Open Ice,” the excellent biography of Horton by Douglas Hunter, so he’ll have a chance to learn more about the man he just passed.
Terry Frei can be reached at 303-954-1895 or tfrei@denverpost.com.
Top 10
Polls close Friday morning:
Rk. Prev. Team Comment
1. 1 Sabres Rolling again
2. 2 Ducks In Denver on Tuesday
3. 4 Red Wings Look out Predators
4. 3 Predators Reality setting in?
5. 5 Devils Brodeur plays on
6. 6 Flames Still an enigma
7. 7 Stars Face Avs today
8. 8 Canucks Twins pick it up
9. 9 Sharks Split with Ducks
10. – Wild Hold last playoff spot
Penalty box
Habs’ Samsonov
Playing like a dog
Miscreant: Canadiens winger Sergei Samsonov
Infraction: So much unrealized potential that if he showed by mistake at Madison Square Garden on Monday or Tuesday, he’d be mistaken for one of the entrants in the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show.
The skinny: Since first joining the Bruins in 1996-97, he has tantalized with his talent and driven coaches crazy with flashes of brilliance and then unproductive periods when he doesn’t seem to care. His best goal-scoring years were consecutive 29-goal seasons in 2000-01 and 2001-02 with the Bruins, which certainly weren’t anything to belittle in the obstruction era, but he seemed capable of breaking to the next level – superstardom. He never has, despite the rich two-year, $7.05 million deal he signed with Montreal in the offseason as an unrestricted free agent. Coach Guy Carbonneau made him a healthy scratch last Sunday, Samsonov publicly asked for a trade and the Canadiens placed him on waivers Tuesday. Nobody claimed him, he remains with the Canadiens and after meeting with Carbonneau, says the air has been cleared. But he’s still the same player. A dog.
What the penalty should be: Well, with a guaranteed contract with another year to run, there can’t be much of one, but the Canadiens will try to unload him before the Feb. 27 trading deadline – and, failing that, should consider buying him out in the offseason.
Spotlight on…
NHL Ironman Doug Jarvis
Even after Karlis Skrastins passed Tim Horton and became the NHL record-holder for consecutive games played by a defenseman last week, he was still barely halfway to the record for all skaters.
That certainly doesn’t diminish his accomplishment, given the nature of his position and his shot-blocking game.
But it underscores how amazing it was that center Doug Jarvis, now an assistant coach with the Canadiens, played 964 consecutive games for Montreal, Washington and Hartford from 1975-87. In fact, he never missed a game from the time he went straight from major junior’s Peterborough Petes to the Canadiens, until he went down to become a player-coach with Binghamton of the American Hockey League after two games of the 1987-88 season.
In a telephone conversation last week, Jarvis said he “played with all the normal bumps and bruises,” and the closest the streak came to ending earlier was when he was with the Capitals in early 1985.
He suffered a concussion in a game at Detroit on Jan. 8, 1985. He was checked out after the game, and played the next night in St. Louis. “In this day and age now, that probably wouldn’t have happened,” Jarvis said. “But they gave me the once-over and I was good to go.”
The game in Detroit ran his streak to 762 – the third-longest streak in NHL history at the time. He went on to catch Craig Ramsay (776 games with Buffalo from 1973-83) and, finally, Garry Unger (914 games with the Blues and three other teams from 1968-79).
“When you’re going through something like that, or at least the way it was with me, you don’t really think a whole lot about it,” Jarvis said. “You want to go to the rink and play because that’s your job. The only time I really thought about it at all was each time I was passing somebody.”
Skrastins now leads the defensemen, and perhaps the most stunning streak of all was the one put together by goaltender Glenn Hall. He played 502 consecutive complete games in the net for Detroit and Chicago from the opening of the 1955-56 season to Nov. 7, 1962. Hall, who later served a brief stint as the Colorado Rockies’ goaltending consultant, left the streak-ending game with a back injury.
