GREAT OR GRATING? : King Coach May Have the NHL’s Hottest Player, but He Has Become the League’s Hottest Topic

For a person whose problem is supposed to be an inability to deal with the media, Robbie Ftorek sure gets a lot of ink.

And they spell his name right.

What could he possibly have done in the first few months of his first full season as a National Hockey League coach to land himself on the cover of The Hockey News with the provocative headline, “The Pros and Cons of Robbie Ftorek?”

As if the whole of the NHL was waging the debate. Which is not far from so.

For a guy who was known throughout the American Hockey League as a player’s coach, Ftorek sure has managed to create a stir by seemingly being at odds with the player every coach dreams of coaching. For all the world, it appears that he has taken on Wayne Gretzky, head to head.

Does that make any sense?

For a guy who was considered an intuitive leader, who was made the first (and still the only) English-speaking captain of the Quebec Nordiques, who was once brought up by the New York Rangers just because they needed his leadership, Ftorek has been accused more times than you would ever guess of playing favorites and stirring up discontent.

Is there a thread of logic here that people are missing?

Here’s a young guy starting his first full season as an NHL coach behind the bench of one of the winningest teams, a team blessed with the hottest property in the league, a team making a historic turnaround, but instead of basking in the glory and thanking his lucky stars, Robbie Ftorek refuses to crack a smile.

And he really doesn’t want to talk about it.

What gives?

“Robbie is Robbie,” offered King owner Bruce McNall, shrugging apologetically while echoing the favorite phrase of anyone asked to explain Robbie Ftorek.

Ftorek apparently can be defined only in terms of Robbie.

With Ftorek, everyone learns to expect the unexpected.

The only constant is Ftorek’s strict adherence to the priorities he establishes.

Such as when McNall interviewed him for the job last December. For starters, Ftorek was not immediately available to meet with McNall after Mike Murphy was fired as coach. He first had a practice to run in New Haven, Conn. Never mind that the Kings own the minor league Nighthawks and McNall owns the Kings. Ftorek was coach of the Nighthawks at the time, and that made those players his first priority--not the owner.

Over dinner, Ftorek ended up interviewing McNall and he left saying that he’d have to consider the offer and get back to McNall with an answer. He wasn’t going to move up to the big leagues of coaching just to move up if the situation wasn’t right.

And money was not the object, either. At that meeting, McNall kept trying to discuss a contract, but Ftorek was more interested in how the team was going to be run, what the long-term plan for rebuilding would be.

McNall was very impressed that Ftorek was more concerned with the team and with winning than he was with his own advancement or his own salary.

Was that, perhaps, a bright ploy?

McNall thinks not. Ftorek is too honest. As McNall put it: “Don’t look too hard for the real Robbie Ftorek. The real Robbie Ftorek is the one standing right in front of you.”

And when Ftorek is considering matters of hockey, the team always comes first. Always. No exceptions.

Ftorek is so adamant he has trouble speaking of Gretzky in the same terms the rest of the hockey world speaks of the Great One.

Ftorek’s explanations that, as coach of the Kings, he sees Gretzky as 1 of 20 players, 1 piece of the puzzle, have been so widely quoted and so widely mocked that an editorial cartoon in The Hockey News went to the ridiculous extreme of depicting Ftorek as one of the Wise Men gathered around the baby Jesus, supposedly saying, “Well as far as I’m concerned, he’s just another baby!”

Ftorek has explained that he wasn’t saying Gretzky was no better player than the other 19 or that Gretzky wasn’t a more important piece of the puzzle, but that the coach has to find a way to use Gretzky in the bigger picture. The key, though, is that Ftorek does not go out of his way to defend his words. He has no patience for playing semantics with reporters, and he doesn’t give a moment’s notice to the way the media is making sport of him.

McNall says: “To Robbie, nothing matters but the players and winning the hockey game. All the other things are extraneous. Does he care what the media says? Not in the least. If it hurt the team, yes . . .

“To Robbie, if it’s not family, it’s not important. His personal family comes first, and then his team, which is his hockey family. Anything that’s a problem in a family should stay within the family. The outside world--and that means anybody not on the team, and that means the media--should stay out of it.”

Or, as Ftorek puts it, in hockey talk: “What happens in the (dressing) room, stays in the room.”

When it leaks out of the room, as it did after he and Gretzky exchanged one-liners in Detroit, he steadfastly sticks to his policy. Instead of admitting the exchange, commenting on it, laying it to rest, Ftorek insisted on stonewalling it. So it became a fast-rolling rumor, a fast-growing issue. But Ftorek considers anyone who discusses team business a “snitch.”

Which made it difficult for Gretzky to explain away the tension that gripped the team for the next few games after the incident in Detroit.

Which made it difficult for McNall to handle when he altered his plans and flew to Vancouver to try to smooth the ruffled feathers of his players and to smooth things over with the media.

What had happened, and what was widely known among the media, was that Gretzky was benched for the start of the third period after he broke his stick on the back of the net in frustration with himself for giving up a goal in the final minute of the second period. In the room, Ftorek told the team that he was going to bench Gretzky at the start of the next period (and he did, for about 8 minutes) because he was trying to “teach” the players composure.

Gretzky fired back: “Robbie, if you want to teach, teach in New Haven. We’re here to win the Stanley Cup.”

But there was never any attribution on the report. None of the players would confirm it on the record. No one wanted to be labeled the “snitch.”

Some newspapers chose to print the exchange as hearsay. Others were more conservative. At this point, it has been on the record for weeks, been discussed at length, and no one who was in the “room” denies it.

At the time, Gretzky could say only: “There is no problem. . . . There was no fight. . . . There was no argument.”

It was obvious to everyone, and McNall acknowledged it, that something had happened.

Gretzky, to this day, while not denying that something happened, stresses that it’s not an ongoing problem. “I don’t hold a grudge,” he says. “I’ve said all along that I don’t have a problem with Robbie. I think he’s a good hockey man. I think he’s still learning some things about coaching in the NHL.”

He would like to see the subject dropped.

Does Ftorek have a problem with Gretzky?

“No,” Ftorek says. End of comment.

While the 8-minute gap and the Gretzky-Ftorek exchange have been blown out of proportion in terms of a quick venting of emotion, it is symptomatic of the position in which Ftorek has put himself.

Relatively speaking, he’s the new guy. Even after playing in the World Hockey Assn. and the NHL for 13 years and then coaching in the AHL for more than 2 seasons, he’s still officially a rookie as an NHL coach.

Besides, most people like Gretzky and most people don’t like Ftorek. Especially among the media. Ftorek antagonizes the media. Not always intentionally. But a quick impression of Ftorek, especially by reporters who see him just a couple of times in a season, can be a real jolt. So this issue is not going to die quickly or quietly.

It’s the kind of incident that is retold gleefully.

Those people who like Ftorek absolutely swear by him. They call him inspirational, brilliant, a most loyal and disciplined man, the most highly principled man one could ever hope to meet.

But learning to like Ftorek is an acquired taste.

Some of the Kings have yet to acquire it.

In fact, a couple of players who were traded early in the year really blasted him once they didn’t have to worry about that “snitch” stuff.

Jay Wells, who was traded to Philadelphia, has said that Ftorek could not tolerate players who disagreed with him, and that the “team” philosophy is all talk because he plays favorites. Wells said: “He wants guys who will do whatever he says, because he thinks he’s God.”

Larry Playfair, who was traded in the first weeks of the season, said he thought he was traded because he dared to disagree with Ftorek.

Goalie Glenn Healy thinks maybe that is all sour grapes, because no one wants to be traded from Los Angeles at this point.

King captain Dave Taylor, too, often defends Ftorek, although he admits that his coach is a little “different.”

Ron Duguay of the Kings played alongside Ftorek when they were with the New York Rangers, and he says he has no problem playing for him.

“I understand Robbie, and I don’t have a problem with him,” Duguay said. “I understand him, but I can’t explain him to someone else. You have to get to know him. He’s a little different. But, then, I’m a little different, too.

“There have been some guys who have come to me and asked me to give them some insight into Robbie, and I try. But he is a little bit hard to explain.”

Actually, he’s very hard to explain.

Every adjective used to describe him is, somewhere along the line, rejected in the interest of clarification.

He is most commonly described as “intense,” and that does seem to be his overriding characteristic.

Duguay nods at the word intense but clarifies it. “Actually, I think the better word would be serious. “ Duguay said. “He’s always serious about whatever he’s doing.”

Roy Mlakar, the Kings’ executive vice president, was the general manager in New Haven when Ftorek was the head coach and says Ftorek’s self-discipline and work ethic are unbelievable, but he adds: “He’s not as tightly wound as everyone thinks. I didn’t know the meaning of the word relax until I spent 3 days at Robbie’s place.”

Mlakar and McNall claim that although most may never witness it firsthand, Ftorek has quite a sense of humor. He not only smiles on the sly, he sometimes laughs. He might have been joking when he reported last week: “The first time I met with the Kings I was as honest as I could be with them. I told them I was a messed-up individual. I wanted them to know, from the start, what they were getting into.”

Ftorek is also commonly called “arrogant.” One columnist called him “an egotistical jerk.”

McNall can see where someone might get that impression. But he begs to differ.

“Robbie can come off as arrogant, but he’s just the opposite,” the King owner said. “He is so dedicated to what he’s doing, and he is so concentrated into that, that he comes off as distant sometimes. He’s probably one of the most down-to-earth guys I’ve ever met.

“He can be pretty abrupt with people, especially if he thinks they are getting into business that really isn’t their business. That’s where he usually has problems with reporters. But he does the same thing with me. There are things that he thinks that I, as the owner, really don’t need to know. There are things that I should know that Rogie (Vachon, the general manager) doesn’t need to know.

“He can be very, very headstrong about what he believes is right. . . . But I wouldn’t say arrogant.”

One of the things that he feels strongly about is that all coaches on a coaching staff should be treated equally and respected equally by the players. That’s why he never refers to himself as the head coach, and he never refers to Bryan Maxwell or Cap Raeder as assistants.

Ftorek says he has been called stubborn. But on day-to-day topics, he believes he’s pretty flexible. “I listen to the players, I listen to the other coaches and I can be influenced by what I hear.”

But Ftorek’s tone changes from conversational to coldly serious when he points out the difference between a solicited and an unsolicited opinion. “When I was a player, I had my own opinions, I had definite opinions, but I kept them to myself unless a coach asked for my opinion,” Ftorek said. “If asked, I would say, ‘What do I think?’ And I would give my opinion until he couldn’t believe it . . .

“But then, whether it went with my opinion or not, I did whatever the coach told me to do. . . .

“There’s a right way and a wrong way to do things. That’s important.”

Detroit Coach Jacques Demers was asked about his former player right after a game that the Kings had won in Detroit, but he did not hesitate to praise Ftorek. Demers said: “He was a player who gave it everything he had every time he was on the ice. He was a little guy, 155 pounds, but he played about 200 pounds.

“I can say that in my 17-year career, there is no player I have more enjoyed coaching.

“I made him the captain of the Nordiques, because he was the only real leader we had at the time. It was a French-Canadian situation, and people were surprised that I would choose an American player, an English-speaking player. But when he addressed the team for the first time with a speech that he had all written out in French, he was immediately accepted.”

Ftorek said he went straight from playing (after a knee injury ended his career) to coaching because: “It’s what I do best--hockey, not coaching.”

It bothered him that, although he knew the Gretzky trade was a possibility months before it happened, he couldn’t base his off-season planning around it.

“I didn’t have time to put myself in all the situations that Wayne was going to put me in,” Ftorek said.

Which is not to say he wasn’t happy to get Gretzky. That notion doesn’t even merit a comment from Ftorek. Just a scowl of disbelief.

When McNall chose to bring up his coach from New Haven instead of hiring an established, big-name coach, the Kings were struggling to rebuild. All of a sudden, Ftorek is responsible for a team with limitless potential. Gretzky isn’t the only new player. There are 15 new players on the team.

McNall: “I think Robbie has an extraordinary technical knowledge of the game. Robbie eventually will go down as one of the great NHL coaches. But he’s breaking in in a very difficult situation. . . .

“I think we should expect him to make some mistakes. . . . He is learning about coaching in the NHL, learning about the media, learning about the players, just as I’m in a learning process as a reasonably new owner. Robbie is the kind of person who is learning all the time. But I think he’s getting the job done right now.”

The Kings have a record of 24-13-1. Which is a far cry from their standing at this time last season.

“You aren’t going to find any team in the National Hockey League with 20 happy players,” McNall said. “When you have people working in that kind of a pressurized environment, there will be conflicts. When everyone can’t play as much as he wants, somebody is going to be unhappy with the coach.

“But as a whole, I think our team is happy. If the players are happy; I’m happy. Right now, I’m happy with Robbie.”