It’s Dryden to the Rescue

Ken Dryden returned to the NHL after an 18-year absence because he wants the Toronto Maple Leafs to do well--and because he wants them to do good.

These are different concepts, and they don’t always seem compatible.

Dryden defines doing well as finding and nurturing young talent to rebuild a stale and stodgy team. He hopes those youngsters will convey to fans what he calls “a sense of try,” a feeling players are improving and making an honest effort even though the results may not reflect it.

Doing good means turning his club into a beacon of ethical light in a business where principles are sometimes left as far behind as a slow-footed defenseman on a breakaway. It means acting responsibly because to many Canadians, the Maple Leafs aren’t just a hockey team--just as Dryden isn’t just a Cornell graduate, a six-time Stanley Cup winner with the Montreal Canadiens, lawyer, Hall of Fame goaltender, TV commentator, author, government youth commissioner or lecturer. He has been all of these, and more.

“The Toronto Maple Leafs are that great, unrealized franchise opportunity,” said Dryden, 50. “The Toronto Maple Leafs have had, with the exception of two years, 30 bad years. And that is wrong and it’s bad. It’s bad for Toronto, it happens to be bad for a lot of people in this country and it’s bad for the NHL, and that shouldn’t continue.

“The Toronto Maple Leafs are an important team in the sense that a few teams in a few sports are real reference points. It’s one of the great things about sport, that it’s visible and it’s not a world apart in terms of its ethics and the way it does things. It’s absolutely mainstream. It means that lessons get played out before millions of people, and they’re interesting lessons. How do you manage? What ethics are you going to have? Do you succeed? Do you fail? How do you succeed and how do you fail?

“You see greed, triumph, you see try. You see the absence of try. It’s powerful theater being played out on a giant stage. But instead of having 2,000 people see it a night, two million people see it a night. And like good theater, people watch and listen and experience and talk about it. . . . It’s important that the Toronto Maple Leafs do things right because people watch and learn. I’m not sure there are too many other jobs in which you can have that kind of impact.”

Had he been offered the club’s presidency a year ago, he would have passed. But with his children out of the nest--his daughter graduated from college last spring and his son entered college this fall--he was amenable when Brian Bellmore, a friend and director of the Maple Leafs, asked him to step in after Cliff Fletcher was fired as president and general manager in May.

In approaching this as less a job than a sociology experiment, Dryden is sure to draw criticism that he’s too intellectual.

“I’m surprised he’s back in hockey, but Kenny always does something surprising,” said former Montreal defenseman Brian Engblom, an ESPN analyst. “He’s never really done things by the book, like taking time off to go to law school [in his prime]. He has always done things his own way.”

Dryden has even written four books, more than most general managers have read, according to a joke making the rounds. He may be too idealistic--or he may be about to revolutionize the way sports teams are managed. No one who knows him would bet against the latter.

“Kenny can pretty well do anything he sets his mind to do,” said King Coach Larry Robinson, who became friendly with Dryden during their years with the Canadiens. “It wouldn’t surprise me at all if he became commissioner of the league someday, and I think he’d be a good one too.”

In his favor is that the NHL is no longer an old boys’ network of wheeler-dealers operating in smoke-filled rooms. Many current NHL coaches and executives are his contemporaries and so many were his teammates that when he arrived at Pittsburgh’s Civic Arena for the June entry draft, he said, “It felt like Ralph Edwards was going to jump up and say, ‘This is your life.’ ”

His biggest edges are his intelligence and patience. Smart enough to know what he doesn’t know, he assembled a strong staff in assistant GM Anders Hedberg and associate GM Mike Smith, formerly Winnipeg’s general manager. Bill Watters, who made a flurry of free-agent signings last summer as the interim GM, was appointed assistant to the president.

Dryden has given them and Coach Mike Murphy a good deal of autonomy, but the price they all pay is constant scrutiny from fans who live and breathe hockey. If anyone is used to such duress, it’s Dryden.

“He played under tremendous pressure in Montreal. As great a goalie as he was, and he was tremendous, if we won a game, 2-1, people were unhappy because they thought it should have been a shutout,” said Doug Risebrough, who was Dryden’s road roommate with the Canadiens--because he was the only player who could sleep with the light on while Dryden read all night--and is now vice president of hockey operations for the Edmonton Oilers.

“In his own performances in hockey he lived through intense pressure. There’s been pressure on him from the media to do certain things, but Kenny has his own thoughts.”

Dryden didn’t plan to be the general manager. He took it on only after Dallas GM Bob Gainey said no, former Washington GM David Poile and Buffalo boss John Muckler were hesitant and he couldn’t find anyone else he liked. No wonder no one jumped at the job, given the Leafs’ penchant for trading kids and top draft picks for veterans and the team’s 30-44-8 record last season.

All of which makes the dual role immense. Yet, it may fit Dryden because he always had the gift of seeing the big picture, in life and in hockey, as clearly as he sees the small details.

“My first impression of Kenny when he took the job was he’s the right person in the right place,” Risebrough said. “I think he knows the formula to win and he knows the formula there, and I think that applies to Montreal and Toronto. He knows how to make an organization successful.”

Said Mighty Duck Coach Pierre Page, whose team will face the Maple Leafs tonight in Toronto: “He was ahead of his time. He’s always seen the future and always been able to take time and figure what’s going to happen next. His vision of the future was always strong, and he was able to relate the game to fans and to kids.”

His ability to relate his passion for hockey was evident in his first book, “The Game.” A keen observer, he wrote eloquently about hockey’s place in his life, from games played on a rink in his backyard through his years with the Canadiens. “ ‘The Game’ typified it all,” Risebrough said. “There was a lot of our thoughts in that book. It capsulized so much of what happened then.”

He wrote another hockey book, “Home Game,” and two non-sports books. It’s the last two he may draw on more with the Maple Leafs.

“The Moved and the Shaken: the Story of One Man’s Life,” looked at a Canadian John Doe, a man with an average education, income, home and family, to examine how he faced being buffeted by life and an unstable economy. Dryden was surprised to find the man was more content than Dryden’s affluent and better-educated peers because he always believed tomorrow held great promise. Dryden wants to create a similar sense of possibility among Maple Leaf fans.

“That’s been part of the problem in Toronto the last couple of years,” he said. “People would look at the ice surface and say, ‘This isn’t a bad team but all of its core players, [Doug] Gilmour, [Kirk] Muller, [Mike] Gartner, [Dave] Ellett, Wendel Clark, are all of the same age. They’re all around age 30 or 31 and they’re still pretty good players but tomorrow, they’re not going to get any better, and the players coming up are not of the same dimension. I’m not feeling the way I’m feeling because of what I see on the ice now. It’s that what I see on the ice makes me feel this way about tomorrow.’

“The challenge of any organization anywhere is to be good enough and promising enough today that in the imagination of players, fans, coaches and the media you can sort of nod your head and say, ‘There’s something there. We’re heading in the right direction. I can imagine the destination of the direction I see out there.’ That’s what you’ve got to deliver.”

For “In School: Our Kids, Our Teachers, Our Classrooms,” Dryden spent a year in a high school near Toronto to study the educational system. He concluded that creating a supportive environment and being optimistic at the start of the school year--or season--will foster growth and help students--or players--reach their potential.

“[Players’] part of the bargain is to decide there are new possibilities and they’re going to try to deliver them,” he said. “It’s our obligation as coaches and managers to encourage that, so that when that first bad pass is made up center in your own zone and it gets intercepted, your first instinct isn’t to say, ‘I’ve seen that happen a hundred times over the last three years. Here he goes again. He’ll never learn. Forget it.’ Maybe this year, for some reason, that’s the anomaly, not a bad habit. Maybe that pattern isn’t part of his story anymore. Maybe he’s in the midst of writing a new story for himself and we wrote him off prematurely.”

The Maple Leafs are testing his theories and his patience, with a 3-6-1 record and little offensive production. Dryden chooses to see the glass as half full, citing good early performances from rookies Mike Johnson and Alyn McCauley and young center Steve Sullivan, and noting that the Leafs are still within reach of a Western Conference playoff berth.

“We don’t have as many points as we should have to show for those efforts, but what we have to remind ourselves of is we are playing better than that,” he said. “We’ve been playing against better opponents and we have been on the road a lot. When the schedule starts to turn, if we keep at it, the results are going to turn too.

“Our challenge is to make the playoffs and our challenge, like any team, is to stay in the game. You stay in the individual game and you stay in the game of the season.”

Dryden stayed in the game by playing in a men’s league until this year, when a nagging injury stopped him. He won’t play goal because he can’t play as well as he used to; he quit playing forward after a brief try because, “the life of the forward is getting things wrong almost all the time and I couldn’t live with the failure. The goalie gets things right most of the time or you’re not going to be a goalie. . . . I decided to play defense and sort of made the compromise where you get it right more often because you have more time.”

It’s one of the few compromises he’s ever likely to make.

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* THE NHL

Ron Wilson is still bothered about ouster by the Ducks. Helene Elliott’s column, C6