McVie Is Proof That NHL Expansion Builds Characters

Tom McVie is one of hockey’s characters, a veteran coach with a deep, ponderous voice and a gruff but friendly wit.

As Mighty Ducks General Manager Jack Ferreira has told his old acquaintance, “Tom, if Brillo could talk, it would sound like you.”

McVie is a man who can find a twist of humor in even the darkest times.

He’s had to. He’s an expansion team veteran.

When the Mighty Ducks and the South Florida team join the NHL this fall, they will be the league’s fourth and fifth new teams in three years. The expansion boom has led a lot of people to McVie, now a Boston Bruins assistant. They seek the wisdom of his painful experience.

“I’m the only guy walking this planet who’s coached three expansion teams (while they were still developing), and a lot of people say I can carry on a fairly sound conversation,” said McVie, who coached the Washington Capitals, the Winnipeg Jets (after they were absorbed from the World Hockey Assn.) and the New Jersey Devils, taking over the Devils they moved from Colorado. That team entered the league as the Kansas City Scouts. “A lot of people also say I should be in the cuckoo’s nest like the one in the movie with Jack Nicholson.”

The Ducks will be looking for their first coach soon. As teams are eliminated from the playoffs, Ferreira will begin seeking permission to talk to the dozen or so coaches on his list, zeroing in on one perhaps by late May. The team would like to have a coach on board before the June expansion and entry drafts, though it is not an absolute necessity.

McVie, with more expansion experience than any one man should have, has an idea what sort of coach for which Ferreira ought to look.

“The kind of coach a new team would need--naturally, he’s got to be a teacher, he’s got to know the game of hockey, he’s got to have experience because the only way to know it is to have done it,” McVie said. “He’s got to have enthusiasm. But more than all the other things together, he’s got to have a sense of humor. The thing is, even though you know you can’t be expected to do much, you’re talking about misery. It really is misery, but if you keep your wits about you, you can get through it. Even though people say it’s just a game, but it can be a living hell. It’s not just a game, believe me. . . . There’s an old saying, ‘War is hell.’ Expansion’s worse. It’s not like having to go to the Persian Gulf, but it wears on you constantly.”

McVie knows who he’d try to hire--but Terry Crisp is already working as the coach of the Tampa Bay Lightning, who won 23 games in their just-ended first season.

“I would think if you could find another Terry Crisp, he is the perfect model,” McVie said. “He knows the game, he won the Stanley Cup in Calgary, and he always coaches the game with such enthusiasm. He did a great job down there this year. Game 1 to Game 80, you looked at him behind the bench, and you couldn’t tell by his look what game it was, and there is a lot of frustration there.”

Ferreira has hired an expansion coach before, picking George Kingston for the San Jose Sharks job when Ferreira was general manager there.

“What we’re going to be looking for is an aggressive, pro-active type, very knowledgeable coach,” Ferreira said. “He certainly has to be a teacher, but also--there’s a lot of peaks and valleys when you’re working with an expansion team--someone that is a good motivator.”

The coach the Ducks ultimately choose probably will be someone who has been either a head coach or assistant in the NHL this season, or a minor league head coach, though Ferreira allows there might be “a couple” of college coaches he would be consider.

“There’s two directions you can go,” Ferreira said. “You can get someone that’s currently in the league. You want someone who has knowledge of the National Hockey League. But there’s also some highly qualified guys that are now coaching in the minor leagues. To overcome that, you can surround them with assistants that are guys that are presently in the National Hockey League and know the league.”

In San Jose, Kingston’s first team won 17 games, but as the Sharks turned to younger players this year and suffered some major injuries along the way, the team stumbled to 71 losses, an NHL record. Now Kingston has to wait to see what his fate will be. He is taking a calm approach--as befits an expansion coach.

“I think he has to be a person that can remain very patient and very supportive and keep things in perspective in a very trying and frustrating situation. It is all it’s cracked up to be,” Kingston said. “You have to help young men through trying times by being very much an optimist, very much a positive thinker. Otherwise, you’ll get sucked into a morass.”

There are talented young coaches waiting to get a break in the NHL. Youthful enthusiasm counts for something, but Kingston thinks experience might count for more.

“I think you need to have quite a bit of experience in order to keep your perspective. I’m not saying a young coach would not be able to handle it. But to survive in pro sports, the highs can’t be too high, and the lows can’t be too low. When one is younger, the highs tend to be high and the lows low. Somehow I think you have to smooth it out somewhere between heaven and hell in the NHL.

“You have to keep perspective. You have to be unrealistic in your expectations about how hard the players will try and what you believe you can accomplish every night. But you also have to have a dose of realism so you don’t compound the frustration for the players, because every night you are overmatched. The other team has much more depth, much more experience, much more skill, talent, size, speed and everything else.”

The strain eventually shows.

When Sharks goaltender Jeff Hackett shattered a stick in frustration in front of the bench after a 6-0 loss to Edmonton in January, Kingston called the action “unacceptable.” Kingston was concerned the act was a display of anger at the other players, but Hackett said it was only his own frustration.

In Ottawa, where the first-year Senators set an NHL record with 40 road losses, Coach Rick Bowness recently sharply criticized about half the team for lack of effort.

“On the surface, he looked pretty good,” said McVie, who coached Bowness in Winnipeg and saw him when the Bruins and Senators met late in the season. “I have a feeling it’s tearing him up inside.”

It won’t comfort the Sharks and Senators much now, but years later, expansion tales make for funny stories.

“I have enough material, if I live to be 100, I’ll never run out,” McVie said.

Coaching an expansion team is a rather thankless job. A coach can figure his job will probably last longer than a carton of milk--but it might not outlive a light bulb.

Of the original coaches hired by the 12 teams that have joined the NHL since the 1970-71 season, three didn’t survive their first season, three more didn’t survive their second.

Still, there’s always someone willing to take an expansion job.

McVie became the coach of the Washington Capitals, long regarded as hockey’s worst expansion team, 36 games into their second season, in 1975-76. They had won only eight games in their first season, a record that still stands.

His Washington team finished with 11 victories that year, won 24 games the next year and 17 the year after that. He lasted until 1978.

In 1979, the year McVie’s Winnipeg team had won the Avco Cup as World Hockey Assn. champion, the Jets joined the NHL (along with the Hartford Whalers, Edmonton Oilers and Quebec Nordiques) for the 1979-80 season.

“The last year of World Hockey, we won the championship. I could have run for mayor of Winnipeg and won by a landslide,” McVie said. “After our second game in the NHL, they were throwing stuff at me. Did I get to be such a great coach and then seven or eight months later I didn’t know what I was doing?”

The Jets got 51 points that first season in the NHL and enjoyed a victory over the Canadiens. Not bad, but not all was well. Soon enough, McVie began to take a portrait of Queen Elizabeth that hung in the arena too personally.

“The very first painting the artist did of the Queen wasn’t a very good picture of our Queen,” McVie said. “It’s been changed since, but back then, she seemed to be looking down on me . Then somebody made a copy of that picture and put my face where hers was and distributed it all around.”

Things really fell apart the second year. The team started 1-20-7 on its way to an NHL-record 30-game winless streak.

“I can’t take credit for all that,” said McVie, who was fired 28 games into the season. “I was down the road. After it got to about 14 or 15, I was out the door.”

McVie also coached the New Jersey Devils beginning in 1983-84, the season the Colorado Rockies moved to the Meadowlands after winning only 17 games the year before.

There is a story, perhaps apocryphal, that McVie’s wife, Arlene, followed him to Washington when McVie got the Capitals coaching job, from which he was eventually fired. She was with him in Winnipeg, where he was fired again.

When he got ready to go to New Jersey, the story goes, he suggested she not make the move.

“I finally figured it out,” McVie said. “She’s a jinx.”

In another stint with the Devils, McVie led them to a 38-31-11 record last season, then the best in franchise history. But he was replaced by Herb Brooks, who management felt would deal better with the influx of European players.

Some poor/fortunate soul will get the Ducks job within the next couple of months or so. Unless he has coached an expansion team before, McVie thinks he’ll be in for a rude awakening.

“He just does not know what he’s getting into,” McVie said. “Even though he thinks he does, he just doesn’t know.”

If he seeks McVie out, he might get the advice Don Perry, a former Kings coach, gave McVie.

“Well, young man, I’m going to tell you what you need to do if you want to be a good coach,” Perry told McVie, who was hanging eagerly on every word.

“You’d better go get yourself some players.”