Old-school approach

Randy Carlyle’s father spent 25 years as a maintenance mechanic in the nickel mines clustered around Sudbury, about 240 miles north of Toronto. A program for employees’ children got Carlyle into the mines too. Then still in school, he felt rich earning $9 an hour in a job that carried him through two summers.

“Long enough,” he said, “to figure out that it was not really a career path that I wanted to stay with.”

It wasn’t that he was scared off by the backbreaking work. Or that he knew he was destined to play in the NHL and, someday, become a coach.

As a teenager, he didn’t know what his future might hold.

“When you’re young, you don’t look past the next week,” he said. “I never really seriously considered hockey as a career until my last year. I played major junior, then all of a sudden, your last year they were rating you as a possible first-round draft choice.”

Carlyle made it out of Sudbury because he supplemented his modest talent with a fierce determination and sound instincts. The values and work ethic instilled in him by his parents, who died a few days apart in 1989, continue to serve him well in his second season coaching the Ducks, who will face the Ottawa Senators in the Stanley Cup finals beginning Monday at the Honda Center.

A solid 5 feet 10 and 200 pounds during his playing days, Carlyle wasn’t a sleek, swift defenseman in the mold of Paul Coffey. But he got his points as a terrific power-play quarterback and won the Norris Trophy as the NHL’s top defenseman in 1981.

He was also dogged defensively, refusing to cede an inch of ice around his own net and skilled at defusing scoring threats by anticipating opponents’ plays and breaking them up.

Everything he did, he infused with passion. He usually expressed himself bluntly, and he might have alienated some teammates with the manner that now causes some of the Ducks’ young players to roll their eyes and wear an expression that suggests they’re being force-fed cod liver oil.

Carlyle certainly doesn’t inspire warm and fuzzy feelings from winger Dustin Penner, who was singled out for criticism by Carlyle last week before the Ducks defeated Detroit for the Western Conference title.

“I have to believe he’s doing his best for me. I may not like it, but I have to believe that it’s for the benefit of team and myself,” said Penner, who hasn’t used his 6-4, 245-pound frame and good hands to dominate the slot area as often as Carlyle would like.

“It’s like a student-teacher relationship.... When you’re young and your parents tell you to do something and you wonder why, five months, five years down the road you see that they were only doing it to help you. I’m sure that will be the case here.”

Penner played probably his best game of the series Tuesday, when the Ducks closed out the Red Wings. It’s no coincidence. Carlyle can push buttons and his humor can be biting -- though he seems to have toned it down this season -- but he is genuine.

He is what he was brought up to be.

“It’s like the values you’re taught when you’re young, at home,” he said Friday, after the Ducks practiced at Anaheim Ice. “It’s please and thank you and respect your elders and respect the people that are around you.

“The one thing that was inbred in my mind is that the NHL was like a cruise ship or a boat going by and if you didn’t get on the ship, the ship was going to sail without you. And to stay on the ship you had to work extremely hard. Once you go there you could never relax.

“That’s what we try to implant in our kids’ minds here. If you think you’ve accomplished something just because you made the NHL, you have to realize that it’s much harder to maintain it and maintain a high level of play.”

As a player, he believed things had to be done a certain way. That applied to fourth-liners as well as to Teemu Selanne, who scored an eye-popping 76 goals in 1992-93 when the two played for the Winnipeg Jets. Carlyle told Selanne that his work habits had to improve, and he wasn’t shy about saying it.

“We were old-school guys,” Carlyle said of himself and the Jets’ veteran players. “That’s the way a rookie had to earn his stripes.

“Teemu didn’t enjoy practice quite as much as he does now. I think he has fun practicing now.”

Carlyle’s practices are quick but productive. He has about 25 drills in his repertoire that players learn during training camp and can quickly jump into during practice, eliminating the need for him to spend time on diagrams or chalk talks.

He has also become more in tune with players’ personalities and gauging how much more they can give. Second-year center Ryan Getzlaf has become a potential franchise player since Carlyle entrusted him with power-play and penalty-killing duties. Francois Beauchemin, an afterthought in the Sergei Fedorov trade, has matured into a force on defense under Carlyle’s guidance.

“He’s helped us a lot since I’ve been here,” Beauchemin said of the defense corps.

Scott Niedermayer, a former Norris Trophy winner, doesn’t need much direction beyond being told when the bus leaves for the rink. He compared Carlyle to Pat Burns for their shared habit of speaking simply and directly and making clear what is expected of each player, and he said that Carlyle knows when to push and when to hold back.

“Having been a player and understanding what you go through as a player, that helps,” Niedermayer said. “Sort of the emotional side of it through a game or through a playoff series. He definitely has a good feel for when to take different approaches with the team in different situations, whether we’re playing well or poorly.”

They have played well enough to get to the Stanley Cup finals, delaying Carlyle’s annual trip to the summer home he has had since 1979 on Canada’s Manitoulin Island.

“That’s all right,” he said, smiling. “I don’t mind getting there late at all. We have someone cutting the grass.”

It beats working in the mines.

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Helene Elliott can be reached at helene.elliott@latimes.com. To read previous columns by Elliott, go to latimes.com/elliott.

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Record-setter

Randy Carlyle profile

* Age: 51.

* NHL playing career: 17 years (1977-93), defenseman with the Toronto Maple Leafs, Pittsburgh Penguins and Winnipeg Jets.

* NHL head coaching career: Two seasons, both with the Ducks.

* His tenure with Ducks: Anaheim set a club record for victories with 43 in his first season, then broke that record this season with 48.