TAMPA, Fla. — Gerard Gallant was getting near the end of his NHL playing career and was having a hard time on the ice, but so were the Detroit Red Wings on this particular late-season night in the early 90s.
Ticked off as he watched the team sputter from the bench, Gallant poked assistant coach Doug MacLean in the stomach and said, “Tell that fucking dummy to put me on the power play.”
Gallant was comfortable talking to MacLean that way. They had known each other since Gallant was a 10-year-old pipsqueak. In fact, in 1979, when Gallant was 16 years old and in Grade 10 at Three Oaks High School in Summerside, Prince Edward Island, MacLean was his social studies teacher.
So MacLean listened to his former student. He tiptoed down the bench and tapped his pal, head coach Bryan Murray, on the shoulder.
“I left out the ‘fucking dummy’ part, but I said, ‘Bryan, it wouldn’t hurt to give Gerard a little shot on the PP here,’” MacLean recalled, roaring with laughter.
This is how it’s been forever: What you see is what you get with Gallant.
Fiery. Competitive. Always honest, even if it’s to the detriment of own job security.
It’s what he was like as a player. And now, in his first year with the New York Rangers, it’s what you see on the bench from a coach who has his team up 2-1 in the Eastern Conference final, just two victories away from slaying the dragon that is the two-time-defending champion Tampa Bay Lightning and heading to the Stanley Cup Final for the 12th time in franchise history.
Not bad for a guy who once turned in an assignment for MacLean’s class in which he wrote that he aspired to be a postman.
“I told him I think you should stick to hockey,” MacLean said.
“That was back in the old days,” a relaxed, jovial Gallant said, laughing, in the Madison Square Garden hallway as he waited to talk to the media after the Rangers’ Game 2 win over the Lightning on Friday. “I’m glad I listened to Doug. Hockey was for me.”
MacLean wasn’t the only one who saw it.
“He was half (Bob) Probert/(Joey) Kocur, half (Steve) Yzerman/(Adam) Oates,” said Colin Campbell, a teammate and assistant coach of Gallant’s with the Red Wings.
In other words: a combination of toughness and skill.
Gallant’s well-rounded skill set was evident from a young age. He was an incredible athlete, excelling in every sport he tried, but especially hockey.
He’s one of 11 siblings who learned the value of hard work from their parents. His sweet mother, Rosie, worked the canteen at the local PEI rink for years.
Nicknamed “Turk” — short for turkey, which his older brother tagged him as a young boy because he used to chase their uncle’s turkeys — and “Spuddy” because PEI is known for its potato farms, Gallant became a star in junior for the Sherbrooke Castors. He was a sixth-round pick by the Red Wings in 1981.
30 yrs ago, Red Wings took a commanding 3-1 Norris Final lead with a 3-1 win over the Blues. @GoldenKnights bench boss & recent Jack Adams nominee Gerard Gallant scored twice to lead Detroit. pic.twitter.com/w9q6uCImO6
— O-Pee-Chee Stars (@opeecheestars) April 26, 2018
He played his first NHL game in the 1984-85 season at 5-foot-11 and 158 pounds, but he was one tough hombre and a team-first guy who immediately became one of the Red Wings’ most popular and valuable players — both inside the room and with the fan base. Riding shotgun mostly next to Yzerman, Gallant would go on to play 615 NHL games, amassing 211 goals and 1,674 penalty minutes. He stuck with the Red Wings for nine seasons before ending his playing career with his current opponent, the expansion Lightning.
“He was tough as nails,” said former Red Wings teammate Jim Nill, who’s now GM of the Dallas Stars.
Gallant was part of a batch of young guys that included Yzerman, Probert, Kocur, Oates and Petr Klima. He was also part of a cerebral group of players, several of whom would go on to have long coaching and managerial careers — guys like Yzerman, Nill, Campbell, Oates, Mike O’Connell, Dave Lewis, Paul MacLean, Glen Hanlon, Dave Barr, Lane Lambert, Mel Bridgman, John Chabot and Harold Snepsts.
“Gerard was the young leader and the consummate tough guy who could score, had good hands, was competitive,” Campbell said. “He wasn’t from Harvard, by any means, but he came up the right way and was a coach’s dream.”
Yzerman and Gallant complemented each other right off the hop, and the connection went beyond the ice. They were roommates and inseparable pals, and Yzerman has long said he saw Gallant as a mentor.
Steve Yzerman puts Red Wings teammate Gerard Gallant in a headlock as they leave a Detroit bar in 1988: pic.twitter.com/Sc6ObBkK5x
— SI Vault (@si_vault) November 21, 2014
“If you looked at them as players, you wouldn’t think it’d be good chemistry, but it was,” Nill said. “They fed off each other. You look at Spuddy, and you wouldn’t think he was much of a hockey player, but when he gets on the ice, he can shoot a puck, and he wouldn’t back down from anybody.”
MacLean kept repeating “team-first” when describing Gallant, and he recalled one particular example from a Red Wings-Devils game. The previous time the teams had played, Probert lost a fight to Troy Crowder. Probert wanted a rematch.
“Gerard’s about to go out on a shift against Crowder and tells Proby, ‘I’m going to go on for 25, 30 seconds and come right off for you,’” MacLean said. “This way I’ll tire him out for you. Sure enough, he shortens his shift, Proby goes on fresh, Crowder’s already been playing 30 seconds, and you can bet what happened next.
“That’s how Gerard thought as a player. He knew how important it was for Proby to settle the score, so he thought ahead.”
And putting players in a position to succeed would become a theme.
“Players will run through a wall for him,” said Nate Schmidt, who was coached by Gallant with the Vegas Golden Knights.
As a coach, that’s what Gallant leans on — because he’s not an Xs and Os master. He leaves that to assistant coach Mike Kelly, his longtime right-hand man, and former NHL defenseman Gord Murphy, one of his assistants in Columbus and now New York.
“The Rangers work hard,” Lightning coach Jon Cooper said. “That’s kind of a staple of Turk’s teams. They play a pretty simple game, and a lot of it’s based on work ethic and skating and they get on top of you.”
He’s also old school.
That’s obvious when you talk to him. A lot of the way he coaches is based on “feel” and motivation and not a package of analytical data.
“He played the game the way he coaches: hard-nosed, team-first,” MacLean said. “The players trust him. He’s not easy on them, but they trust him. There’s no BS.”
Buffalo Sabres winger Alex Tuch, who played for Gallant in Vegas, echoed that.
“He’s a lot different than most other coaches that I’ve been coached by,” Tuch said, chuckling. “He’s a player’s coach, through and through. He is a guy that really demands the most out of you but understands how to coach each individual person differently. I think he really relies on the core group, the core players, that he has on his team. … He wants that fast pace. He wants that energy. He wants you to work. That’s the biggest thing with him. He wants you to work, and if you do, you’ll be fine.
“He’s not going to go in there and yell at you for 30 minutes and do two hours of video and tell you everything you’re doing wrong. He’s going to yell at you, don’t get me wrong — but he’s going to forget that he even yelled at you right after. And you’re going to go back to how your relationship was before he even yelled at you. He doesn’t hold grudges. He just lets you play, and when you need a push, he doesn’t hold back.”
It’s been a winning recipe. But it hasn’t been one that led to long-term job security, which is why the Rangers had a chance to hire him in the first place just four years after he guided the expansion Golden Knights to the Stanley Cup Final.
Coaches are hired to be fired, as they say, but in Gallant’s case, those firings have been some of the goofiest in NHL history.
MacLean, the first Columbus Blue Jackets president and general manager, replaced himself as coach with Gallant in 2004. Then, 142 games in, MacLean said his owner instructed him to fire one of his best friends.
“It was one of the worst days of my life,” MacLean said. “Usually an owner makes you fire the coach, but you’ve got to take the heat as GM and you don’t tell the coach that. In this case, I told Gerard, ‘I don’t have a choice.’”
Gallant would spend two years each as an assistant with the New York Islanders and Montreal Canadiens. In between, he spent three years coaching the likes of Jonathan Huberdeau, Mike Hoffman and Charlie Coyle on the Saint John Sea Dogs to a 161-34-9 record, an incredible run that included two QMJHL titles, one Memorial Cup win and two CHL Coach of the Year awards.
Then hired by the Florida Panthers, Gallant led them to an Atlantic Division title and only their second postseason appearance since 2000 in 2015-16. The next season, he was fired after 22 games following a game in Raleigh, N.C. He and Kelly were notoriously left waiting for a cab with suitcases and equipment bags in tow outside PNC Arena.
Gallant had known all summer he was on thin ice. Dale Tallon was losing control as team president, the Panthers made a number of peculiar moves that Gallant wasn’t happy about, and the man who never minces words made his feelings crystal clear to GM Tom Rowe and the analytics experts who executed the moves.
As Gallant told Pierre LeBrun: “Maybe I gave my opinion a little bit too much. … I have an honest opinion, and sometimes it doesn’t help you.”
Perhaps that’s what happened in Vegas, too. Despite that 2018 Stanley Cup Final appearance, and despite being eliminated by the San Jose Sharks in 2019 thanks in large part to a mistaken call in Game 7, and despite a decent 24-19-6 record to start the 2020-21 season, Gallant was fired after a four-game skid, replaced by the since-fired Pete DeBoer.
“We were shocked,” Tuch said. “We were completely shocked over the whole thing. This is one great coach, and we’re sitting there in Ottawa after a bad loss to the Sabres expecting that he might come in and yell at us. Figured we might do some video, and some guys, myself included, are probably going to be part of that video.
“But he wasn’t in the room. Two of the assistant coaches were in there, but he and Mike Kelly weren’t. Then (GM) Kelly McCrimmon came in and told us the news. It was very shocking. But here he is again (in the conference final). Why? Because guys love playing for him. They work. He has high expectations for his guys, and he’s able to have those guys rise to the occasion.”
“He’s not a quitter,” Nill said. “We all have hurdles in life, and — it doesn’t matter what — he just overcomes those, and that’s how he is.”
Despite the many “weird situations,” MacLean said, that led to his firings, the 58-year-old Gallant keeps picking himself up, landing new jobs and proving himself all over again.
He has won a Jack Adams and has been a finalist two other times, including this season, when he coached the Rangers to 52 wins his first year after coaching Canada to an unlikely gold medal at last year’s world championships. To go along with his 322-240-61 (includes four ties) career regular-season record, he’s now 28-22 in the playoffs.
Growing up, all Gallant wanted to do was hockey.
“But I never thought I’d get to do it forever,” he said. “I’ve been very blessed. Despite the job losses along the way.”
“He’s just been in tough spots for some reason. … He’s hung in there,” Campbell said. “You’ve got to give him credit.”
And Campbell does, except on days when his name crosses his desk in his role as the NHL’s senior executive vice president.
“We’re buddies … when he doesn’t piss off the referees,” he joked. “I like his fire, I guess, and I understand his passion, without a doubt. But sometimes he pisses the refs off and it ends up on my desk.”
It’s all part of a balancing act for NHL coaches in 2022.
“Coaches today, you’ve got to be somewhat friendly with a player,” Campbell said. “He’s also got to be somewhat aloof. Everyone wants something … more ice time, to play with this guy, and you’re never gonna give him the right answer. But Gerard’s been fired. He’s seen the wrong side of coaching and will do what he thinks is right in order to win. Talk to any player, and they’ll tell you he’s fair.”
That’s exactly what they say.
“He holds his players to a certain standard of playing hard,” Rangers defenseman K’Andre Miller said. “I think what the team likes about him the most is he lets you play your game. Creative guy, he lets you do your thing. It’s just about him trusting us and us trusting him.”
Added teammate Ryan Reaves, who also played for Gallant in Vegas, “He’s a guy that lets players be themselves. Sometimes you see coaches try and change a guy into something they’re not. He doesn’t try and do that. He’s big on letting you know you make mistakes and then letting you go out there and make up for that mistake.
“He might scream at you once in a while, but once he screams at us, he’s done with it, and he knows you’re gonna go out and be better. … Especially the younger players, when they’re not getting harped on every time they make a mistake, it allows them to grow a little bit quicker. I think you see some of our younger guys, the confidence they’ve built over the last year, over the last couple of months into the playoffs. Guys have stepped up. The ‘Kid Line’ (of Alexis Lafrenière, Filip Chytil and Kaapo Kakko) has been unbelievable. And I think a lot has to do with just his coaching style.”
As far as we know, though, no player has tested him as he once tested Murray, calling Gallant a “fucking dummy” on the bench.
“Now that would not go over well,” MacLean said, erupting with laughter.
(Top photo: Jared Silber / NHLI via Getty Images)
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