In preparation for a tough encore after being named NHL coach of the year during his rookie season on the Avalanche bench, Patrick Roy consulted with a deceased basketball legend.
“I was reading a book by John Wooden, and he said the most important thing for a coach is to know your players,” Roy told me during the Avs’ season-opening road trip to Minnesota. “The best way for me to know my players is to put them in different situations, trying different things, to see how they react.”
Wooden, who won 10 national championships as basketball coach at UCLA, died in 2010. But his winning philosophies, what Wooden called his pyramid of success, endure. This past summer, Roy sat down and slowly devoured, page by page, Wooden’s building blocks for achievement.
“It was amazing the approach that Coach Wooden took. I looked at his pyramid very carefully. Values were so important to him. And I truly believe if you stick to your values, good things will happen,” Roy said.
“To tell you the truth, I had a hard time reading the book, because every time I read a new idea, I would go deep into my own thoughts, examining everything (Wooden) said. So I would find myself reading the same page three or four times.”
Roy and his young players took the NHL by surprise and storm a year ago, with the Avalanche rising from also-ran to first-place finisher in the rugged Central Division, and the Hall of Fame goaltender winning the Jack Adams Award as the league’s best coach.
But now the really difficult work for Colorado begins. To finish with 112 points last season, the talented young Avs had to be more than a flash in the pan. But, in hockey, sustained success is tested by fire.
Now we see if Nathan Mac- Kinnon is ready to take the huge step from teenage phenom to the man on which a franchise’s championship hopes can rest. MacKinnon made it all look easy on the ice as a rookie. It’s dealing with the fame, the night life and the grind that can beat down a 19-year-old star learning to grow up in a fish bowl.
Now it’s left to Jarome Iginla, one of great ambassadors of the sport, to show at age 37 that he can keep up on the ice with a team and a league built for speed. Roy has already discovered that finding the right linemates for Iginla is not a matter of plug and play. It’s a tricky chemistry test, requiring the coach to embrace experimentation.
Now the challenge for Semyon Varlamov, whose career-best work between the pipes a year ago made him the most valuable player in a Colorado sweater, is the rugged duty of facing a barrage of pucks, game after game, without blinking. Asking Varly to save a porous defense is an unrelenting, thankless task, and Roy knows better than anybody how even an outstanding goalie’s confidence can take only so many shots before cracking.
“After reading Wooden,” Roy said, “I’ve told our players, from trust to respect to working with a purpose, these are values that great coaches have had a lot of success with, and I realized that these are the values and these are the things we had last year.”
For years at the Final Four, I would regularly seek out Wooden, and the most accomplished coach in history would graciously chat about anything and everything, from what made an outstanding college player a great NBA star, to how he cut my father from the South Bend Central High School hoops team in the years before World War II.
It was an annual pilgrimage to my sports Yoda. Wooden spoke in gentle tones, never talked down and always tried to lift. Basketball historians have compiled his favorite maxims and called them Woodenisms, now put into practice by corporate leaders and NHL coaches alike.
One of my favorite truths in the world according to Wooden: “Failure is not fatal, but failure to change might be.”
What made NHL hockey relevant in Colorado again probably will not make the Avalanche a Stanley Cup champion. Roy will have to dare to experiment, dare to fail, dare to challenge his players to grow.
How much the Avs grow will determine how far they go.
Mark Kiszla: mkiszla@denverpost.com or
