They were on opposite benches Saturday — Colorado’s Patrick Roy and Calgary’s Bob Hartley, the ex-goaltenders who served apprenticeships in the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League before landing NHL jobs.
They also have the shared experience of raising the Stanley Cup on the Pepsi Center ice in 2001, Roy for the fourth time and Hartley for the first.
Beyond that, their paths don’t have much in common.
Hartley, a junior hockey goalie in his hometown of Hawkesbury, Ontario, abandoned plans to attend Ottawa University after his father died. He worked at the local paper mill and then the windshield factory, began coaching as a volunteer goaltending assistant with the Hawkesbury Hawks and then became the head coach. He moved on to coach Laval in the QMJHL, then was with Avalanche AHL affiliates at Cornwall and Hershey before succeeding Marc Crawford as Colorado’s coach in 1998.
Here’s another example of how it can work in hockey: Hartley’s Laval assistant worked for the telephone company, and often was on a telephone pole when he and Hartley talked about practice plans. Today, that Laval assistant, Michel Therrien, is in his second stint as head coach of the Canadiens, and Montreal general manager Marc Bergevin chose Therrien over Roy in 2012.
After his 2003 retirement, Roy served first as general manager, and then also as coach, of the Quebec Remparts, the team he co-owned. And he often consulted with Hartley, who moved on to Atlanta, to Switzerland and then to Calgary in 2012.
Now, flash back to December 2002, when only 18 months after Colorado’s Stanley Cup championship, Hartley was fired. The Avalanche was 10-8-9-4, and while that was underachievement, it was the rare coach firing that caught most by complete surprise. Yet the notice came that Hartley was out, succeeded by assistant Tony Granato.
“As a player, you never like a coach to be fired, quite honestly,” Roy said. “You always feel guilty. You always feel that you could have done something better. But I assume that the day you accept the position, you know what goes with it. … As a player, when I was there, I was disappointed not because he was fired, I was disappointed because of the way we started the season, and we certainly were not happy about it.”
The Avalanche was attempting to take sole possession of the NHL record for consecutive division championships with a ninth in a row. That was a big deal to general manager Pierre Lacroix. Probably too much so in a league in which division championships are relatively insignificant. With that division title chance seemingly slipping away, Hartley was especially vulnerable.
The Avalanche finished 42-19-13-8 that season and clinched the Northwest Division title on the final day, but the chase left Colorado more drained than it should have been. A first-round collapse against Minnesota followed, and Roy retired.
Since, the Hartley-Roy relationship — most notably spiced by Roy’s destruction of video equipment in Anaheim when a coaching stratagem worked but cost Roy a win in his chase for the NHL career record — has evolved. And Roy said it hasn’t changed since they became coaching competitors.
“I’ve always been very close to him,” Roy said. “We talk probably twice a month for the past years.”
Terry Frei: tfrei@denver- or
