Inside the NHL
Posted: Tuesday December 08, 1998 05:04 PM
This week's topics:
Sage Advice | Ursines
of The Times
Lies and Damn
Lies | Bust and Bargain
In The Crease
Sage Advice
Astute counseling by a veteran helped Phoenix to get off to a hot
start
By Kostya Kennedy 
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A fired up Tkachuk (7) has scored 14 goals in leading the Coyotes to a 15-3-3 mark. Glenn James |
The Coyotes' surprising
early-season success--they were 15-3-3 through Sunday--can be attributed to
the fact that they've played solid defense, gotten fine goaltending and
allowed a league-low 35 goals. But Phoenix is also on a roll for a less
obvious reason: 34-year-old right wing Rick Tocchet, whose influence on the
Coyotes' younger team leaders, Keith Tkachuk and Jeremy Roenick, has
changed Phoenix's personality. Consider that Roenick, 28, had never
been serious about working out before Tocchet persuaded him last June to
join him for six weeks of punishing circuit training at a gym in Venice,
Calif. "I threw up, I cried, it was brutal," says Roenick, a center who led
Phoenix with 26 points. "He convinced me to do it." By then Tocchet had
already begun work on the psyches of Roenick and Tkachuk, both of whom are
two-time 50-goal scorers. After the Coyotes squandered a two-games-to-one
lead to the Red Wings last spring to continue the franchise's 11-year
streak of failing to win a playoff series, Tocchet questioned the team's
leadership. He didn't single anyone out, but the 26-year-old Tkachuk was
the captain and Roenick an alternate. In case Tocchet's subtle message
didn't get through, he spelled it out before this season. "I talked to them
about providing a strong example, because others will follow," says
Tocchet. "The team starts with those two. I reminded them they can't take a
night off." That's the kind of leadership Phoenix general manager Bobby
Smith was counting on when he signed Tocchet as a free agent in July 1997.
Tocchet, the lone member of the Coyotes to have won a Stanley Cup (in 1992,
with the Penguins), is a 15-year veteran and, with 393 goals and 2,677
penalty minutes, one of the most tenacious and effective right wings of his
time. He has played alongside Mario Lemieux and Wayne Gretzky and is so
popular among his peers that some 30 NHLers attended his wedding in August.
"Rick tells a guy to work harder, and it means something," says Coyotes
coach Jim Schoenfeld. Still, it took time, as well as that sobering
playoff loss, for Tocchet's star pupils to lend their ears. Now that they
have, Phoenix's locker room has evolved from a spiritless place to one in
which conviviality is underlined by responsibility. Tkachuk, the Coyotes'
leader with 14 goals, is at its epicenter. He good-naturedly exhorts
laggards to hustle onto the team bus, he rides Tocchet and right wing
Dallas Drake ("I just can't tell who's uglier," he says), and he also turns
off the house music when it's time to prepare for practice. Roenick's
transformation is clearest on the ice. After disappointing 29- and 24-goal
seasons, he has curbed his freewheeling style for a grittier game. This
season Roenick and Tkachuk are regularly playing on the same line for the
first time, and last week, when the Coyotes outplayed the Oilers but lost
4-3, the two combined on a telling goal. Tkachuk had the puck behind the
Edmonton net, where he was driven to the ice by a defender. While falling,
he passed to Roenick, who swept in front of the cage, held off another
Oiler and dished to Drake for an easy goal. There's no doubt that Roenick's
role in that play traces to his summer sweat. "He went hard in L.A.,
and it's paying off," says Tocchet. "There were days he got so broken down
I didn't think he'd show up the next morning. But he always did."
Back to the
top Ursines of The
Times The Moscow Circus has long
featured bears trained to skate, stickhandle and shoot pucks, so the
troupe's arrival in Alberta last week helps explain how three Oilers found
themselves skating with a pair of black bears at Edmonton's Clive Arena. In
the words of Oilers defenseman Boris Mironov, the quarter-ton honey lovers
were "a lot bigger than [6'8", 247-pound Kings left wing] Steve McKenna."
Mironov, a Russian, coaxed teammates and countrymen Andrei Kovalenko
and Mikhail Shtalenkov to join him and the bears on ice for a photo op.
Mironov knows the circus organizers because his wife, Katrin, worked for
them as an acrobat and a magician's assistant before she and Boris moved to
Canada in 1993. "She loved being in the circus," says Mironov, "but I
thought it was dangerous." Though Kovalenko and Shtalenkov believed
that the bears were also perilous -- "I didn't get close unless I had to,
and I kept asking if they had been fed," says Shtalenkov -- Mironov was
unconcerned. "The man who trains them was there," he says, "If anything
went wrong, he would have handled it and said, 'Quiet, bear!'"
Back to the
top Lies and Damn
Lies Even as the NHL smartly expands
the variety of statistics that it keeps, it continues to proffer a
worthless number: players' shooting percentages. That stat -- derived by
dividing the number of goals by the number of shots -- isn't a reflection
of shooting accuracy, as it is in basketball. While middling offensive
talents like Flames center Jeff Shantz (six goals at week's end) and Sabres
right wing Dixon Ward (10) were at the top of the league with percentages
of around 30%, Bruins defenseman Ray Bourque, who has won the
most-accurate-shot competition at the All-Star Game in five of the past
nine years, was at a measly 4% (three goals on 75 shots). In fact, many
superior snipers, including Penguins right wing Jaromir Jagr, were shooting
under 10%. Outstanding shooters find ways to put the puck on net much
more often than other players, so their percentage is expected to be lower.
But anytime a shot is on target, good things can happen -- including a
rebound goal by a teammate. Says Islanders director of player personnel
Gordie Clark, "Shooting percentage doesn't tell you much. I don't even look
at it." Back to the
top Bust and bargain
CHRIS GRATTON, C
Flyers
1998-99 salary: $1.5 million
In the summer of 1997, Philadelphia
gave free agent Gratton, the Lightning's franchise player, a $9 million
signing bonus. He played erratically last year and through Sunday had one
goal this season.
MARTIN STRAKA, C
Penguins
1998-99 salary: $500,000
In
the summer of 1997, Pittsburgh gave free agent Straka, an unheralded
journeyman, no signing bonus. He played solidly last year and at week's end
led the Penguins with 14 goals this season. Back to the top Issue date:
December 14, 1998
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