Melrose Lands in a Comfortable Place : Television: After a tumultuous time as coach of the L.A. Kings, Barry Melrose is back at ESPN and ESPN2 for his first full season as an on-air sports personality.

A year ago, Barry Melrose was under stress and under fire. The coach of the Los Angeles Kings was desperately trying to jump-start a plummeting hockey team that had been wracked by injury, financial woe and a number of ill-advised personnel moves. Melrose was thinking about resigning during the off-season when he was fired on April 21, less than two weeks before the end of the 1994-95 campaign.

Life is considerably less tumultuous for the 39-year-old ex-National Hockey League player and coach now that he’s the principal in-studio hockey analyst and a part-time color man for ESPN and ESPN2’s NHL telecasts.

Just 30 minutes after his dismissal from the Kings, Melrose signed on with ESPN to work as a studio analyst during last spring’s NHL post-season games. It was a job he also had held with the network during the previous year’s playoffs. Now he’s back with the twin cable networks for his first full season as an on-air sports personality.

“It’s the greatest life in the world,” Melrose says of his sportscaster job. “You have to prepare and you have to know what you’re saying. But it’s certainly not [as stressful as] coaching an NHL team. When your team is struggling in a major market, it’s the coach who takes all the heat. That was a real tough situation.”

Melrose believes he now watches more hockey than just about anyone else involved with the NHL. Whether he’s at home or at the ESPN studios in Bristol, Conn., he says he spends every night watching up to four pro games. Much of his time is also spent reading up on all the teams and players in the league. “I probably know more about the teams than when I was coaching,” he says.

The Saskatchewan native will only work 10 NHL games this season as a color commentator, a new position he’s attempting to master. All of these contests will be broadcast on ESPN2 and three of them involve the Kings.

Melrose says he is well stocked with insightful anecdotes and observations regarding the Kings. Some involve the organization’s previous financial difficulties, which first erupted publicly in early 1994 after owner Bruce McNall’s business empire fell into a state of disrepair. The organization’s money problems continued after McNall sold 72% of the team to Joseph M. Cohen and Jeffrey Sudikoff that same year. In early October, the organization’s tenuous fiscal standing finally stabilized when billionaire Philip F. Anschutz and Edward P. Roski Jr. purchased the team.

“A lot of people want me to write a book about my three years [with the Kings],” reveals Melrose, who now lives in Glens Falls, N.Y., with his wife and two children. “It was unbelievable the things we went through. They’re funny now but they weren’t at the time. Once [we landed at an airport and] we had to pay the bus driver with cash because he wouldn’t accept a check from us. There are so many great stories like that.”

The verbose and confident Melrose says he aims to entertain as well as inform in his work with ESPN and ESPN2. He dislikes “x’s and o’s” analysts who fail to inject colorful personality into their explanations of the technical and strategic aspects of sports. He says he admires football’s John Madden and baseball’s Bob Uecker for their ability to communicate pertinent information in a humorous and folksy manner.

“You have to make it fun to watch [on TV],” says Melrose, who was known for his blue-collar work ethic as a coach and NHL defensemen. “I think hockey’s been very negligent in doing that. When [people] watch me on TV, I want them to go, ‘Geez, I’d like to go for a beer with Barry Melrose and talk hockey. He seems like he’d be very interesting.’ ”

Reflecting his gung-ho spirit, Melrose says he didn’t hesitate when ESPN executives approached him about working for them during the 1993-94 NHL playoffs. He admits he was “terrible” when he started but believes he’s improved with every game he’s done. He’s learned that conciseness is one of the keys to sports broadcasting, especially when one is doing the color commentary during a typically fast-paced hockey game.

Melrose says he’s received helpful advice from sports broadcasting veterans such as KTLA-TV’s Stu Nahan and KCBS-TV’s Jim Hill.

“People like Stu Nahan watch me and they tell me what I need to improve on,” Melrose says. “I tend to talk too fast. I have to slow down. Little technical things like that I want to improve on. But I don’t want to change how I come across [as a personality].”

Melrose may enjoy his work with ESPN but his youth, competitive spirit and love for coaching would seem to make his reentry into the NHL coaching ranks more a matter of when than if. He was willing to take the Calgary Flames’ coaching job last summer but was passed over in favor of Pierre Page.

Still, Melrose says he isn’t in any hurry to get back into coaching. This feeling was underscored when esteemed coach Jacques Demers was fired earlier this season by the Montreal Canadiens.

“The minute a team struggles, the coach is gone,” says Melrose, who led the Kings to their only Stanley Cup finals appearance in 1993. “Jacques Demers has been coach of the year twice. He’s won the Stanley Cup. The team struggles and he’s gone. Every coach has to accept that that’s the way it works. But that’s why I’m in no hurry to coach again.”

Despite his rough moments with the Kings, Melrose says he has mostly fond memories of his stay in Los Angeles, which was his first NHL coaching job.

“My only regret is that we didn’t win the Stanley Cup [in ‘93],” he says. “I got to coach some great players like Wayne Gretzky and Jari Kurri. It was a beautiful city. If I hadn’t gone to L.A. I might not have gotten this job with ESPN.”

* Barry Melrose can be seen each week as an analyst during ESPN’s “National Hockey Night” game telecasts and on ESPN2’s Tuesday-Saturday “NHL 2Night” highlight show. He is also an occasional NHL color commentator for ESPN2.