DALLAS — His hair has grayed, but the voice and the mannerisms on the ice were familiar during the Dallas Stars’ morning skate at the American Airlines Center. Nearly 14 years after coaching the Avalanche to Colorado’s first major-league championship, Marc Crawford has evolved from a headstrong coaching prodigy into a slightly mellowed veteran. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that he’s adapted.
“I think the biggest thing I recognize now more than anything is that experience teaches you that when you use your emotional edge, you sometimes have to deal with the problems and the fallout from that,” Crawford said.
“I think today’s athletes, they don’t want the fallout. There’s better ways to get your message across.
“You still have to be human. You still have to be yourself. You have to also guard against the competitive outbursts, between periods and hopefully on the bench a little bit. On the bench is hard. They’re young, and it can be the heat of the moment.
“But the other thing is that today’s generation of player asks the question, ‘Why?’ over and over and over again, and they expect answers. They’re used to getting answers.”
I laughed and said I could remember a time in the NHL when the response to anyone impertinent enough to ask, “Why?” was an epithet-laced reminder to shut up. But I also said I wasn’t sure it had changed that much since the mid-1990s, when he got into NHL coaching. Crawford politely disagreed.
“I don’t think as much as today,” he said. “Not even close. They’re able to grasp more information in the meetings that we have.”
He brought up the expansion of coaching staffs and increased technology. “We used to think we were flush, and we probably were at the time,” he said. “But it all pales in comparison to the preparation the guys do, the preparation that they do on their own and also the information they’re able to absorb.
“The professionalism of a Joe Sakic or a Mike Modano and Jere Lehtinen and Patrick Roy, that’s the kind of thing in every generation. Patrick was so detail-oriented. I just think there are a lot more athletes now that do a lot better job of preparing, and as coaches, we have to recognize that as well.”
If some of that sounds to you as if Crawford might have done some reflection in the wake of Vancouver winger Todd Bertuzzi’s attack on Avalanche winger Steve Moore in March 2004, and all the circumstances that led up to it, that’s probably an accurate assessment. Crawford’s smirk as he stood behind the bench, with Moore still down on the ice, is unforgettable.
Crawford is a third-party defendent in Bertuzzi’s Canadian lawsuit and said Friday he couldn’t comment on the incident.
Dallas is the third stop for Crawford since he left the Avalanche under bizarre “got resigned” circumstances after Colorado’s first-round playoff collapse against Edmonton in 1998. The Avalanche’s trick of avoiding paying Crawford for the final year of his contract, yet holding out for compensation if he signed with any other team, and getting it from the Canucks when he went to Vancouver in early 1999, was both petty and right out of the Tom Sawyer school of fence painting. His NHL coaching resume included Quebec/Colorado (four seasons), Vancouver (seven) and Los Angeles (two) when new Dallas general manager Joe Nieuwendyk ousted Dave Tippett and brought in Crawford last summer.
Crawford will be shooting to get the Stars — 11th in the conference but only three points out of a playoff spot going into Friday’s games — back into the postseason after a year’s absence.
The front-office reorganization, with Nieuwendyk stepping over demoted co-GMs Les Jackson and Brett Hull in the power structure, has led to an attempted rebuilding on the fly. Modano likely is in his final season, goalie Marty Turco has been inconsistent, and Brad Richards still hasn’t come close to living up to the $7.8 million a season salary the Stars inherited when they acquired him from Tampa Bay two years ago.
But young forwards Loui Eriksson and James Neal are coming into their own, and there is enough talent — veteran and otherwise — that it wouldn’t be a shock if Dallas stormed back into the playoff field.
Spotlight on …
Stars defenseman Karlis Skrastins
DALLAS — Karlis Skrastins, who surpassed Tim Horton’s NHL ironman record for defensemen when he was with the Avalanche, will play for Latvia in the Winter Olympics next month.
The Latvians will be in Group B with Russia, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. If they win a game — only one game — there likely will be dancing in the streets of Riga, and there might even be a Latvian television movie made about the team.
“It’s something special, especially for our country,” Skrastins said Friday. “Everybody’s going to watch it on TV.”
Skrastins, 35, and defenseman Oskar Bartulis of Philadelphia are expected to be the only NHL players on the Latvian roster. The majority of the squad is made up of players from Dinamo Riga, Latvia’s entry in the Kontinental Hockey League.
“We have to be happy and excited that we are there and try to play every game,” Skrastins said. “For a lot of the guys on our team, coming from Europe, it’s going to be exciting to play against those kinds of guys, those kinds of teams.”
Avalanche defenseman Ruslan Salei is back skating with the team after undergoing back surgery, and he has played only one game for Colorado this season. He’s not only seeking to get back in the Colorado lineup, but also trying to get ready to play in the Olympics for Belarus.
If Salei, the captain of the 2002 Belarus team that knocked off Sweden in the quarterfinals at the Salt Lake Games, is able to suit up, he would be one of four NHL players on the Belarus roster. The others are forwards Mikhail Grabovski of Toronto and brothers Andrei and Sergei Kostitsyn of Montreal.
Belarus will be in Group C, with Sweden, Finland, and Germany.
After the three-game, round-robin group competition, the top four teams in points will get byes into the quarterfinals, while the other eight will be matched in four games to decide the remaining quarterfinal spots. So all teams, even the longshots, are guaranteed at least four Olympic games.
Terry Frei, The Denver Post
