Woodcroft and St-Louis: A tale of two coaches

Neither one has any tenure as an NHL head coach, but both come to their jobs with with plenty of experience in hockey, just not in the same places

Martin St-Louis silenced his doubters in a big way as a player. He expects to do the same thing as a coach.

Jay Woodcroft and Martin St-Louis are separated by fewer than 14 months on their birth certificates and, before tonight, neither had ever stood behind an NHL bench as a head coach. And when they do, it will be for two of the most hockey-mad and frustrated markets in the NHL, neither one with any job security beyond this season. But that’s where the similarities between the two men end, both in terms of their coaching pedigrees and their mandates for the rest of this season.

St-Louis beat Woodcroft to the punch by two nights after making his debut with the Montreal Canadiens tonight, replacing the much-maligned Dominique Ducharme. When St-Louis looks over at the opposing bench, he’ll see a guy who has a Stanley Cup ring and 1,313 on games on his head coaching resume. Woodcroft will make his debut Friday night when the Edmonton Oilers host the New York Islanders, who happen to be led by Barry Trotz, who edges him by a  1,770-0 margin in the NHL games-coached race. Woodcroft replaces Dave Tippett, the latest in a long line of men who have been unable to coax a more consistent effort out of a group of players that look great on paper.

Both are head coaching neophytes in the best league in the world who could not have come from more divergent paths. St. Louis started when he came out of the University of Vermont as a 5-foot-8 college hockey star and wound through a series of disappointments and setbacks before he found a home in the NHL, where he won two scoring championships, an MVP award and a Stanley Cup and established himself as one of the greatest small men to ever play the game. As a coach, the sum total of his experience is working with minor hockey teams in Connecticut, coaching his hockey-playing sons.

Woodcroft’s path, meanwhile, goes off in a completely different direction. As a player, he had four years at the University of Alabama-Huntsville, then embarked on a five-year pro career that spanned two continents and some minor pro backwaters. In his best offensive season, he scored 17 goals in the defunct United Hockey League, which at the time was the lowest rung of professional hockey. He was a video coach for the Detroit Red Wings for three years, then spent the next 10 as an assistant coach for the San Jose Sharks and Oilers, before running his own American Hockey League bench with the Oilers’ affiliate in Bakersfield the past three-and-a-half seasons.

Both men are in their jobs because of desperation, but their objectives could not be more different. St-Louis has little pressure in terms of wins and losses. His job is to give this weary Canadiens’ roster a sense of pride and identity and the opportunity to play the final 37 games of 2021-22 as though they’re not a series of macabre games designed to determine how bad they can actually be. This new lease on life will be good for them, the Canadiens reckon, and help their young players get their heads on straight for future seasons.

Jay Woodcroft (left) was a trusted assistant under Todd McLellan for 10 seasons with the San Jose Sharks and Edmonton Oilers.

“It’s time for our team, right now, to start showing the hockey community, the fans of the Montreal Canadiens, that we’re not going to roll over here,” said Canadiens GM Kent Hughes. “We understand we’re not going to make the playoffs this season, but we’re not going to roll over. We want a competitive team, we want a team that brings culture. Marty is the perfect embodiment of what we want to accomplish here, not just this season, but going forward.”

Indeed. Even if St-Louis were able to guide the Canadiens to a perfect 37-0-0 record the rest of this season, they’d finish with 97 points, which probably wouldn’t be enough to get them into the playoffs. This is an epically bad season for the franchise, one of the worst ever. It’s St-Louis’ job to ensure it doesn’t go entirely off the rails. In a perfect world, the Canadiens would have preferred Ducharme earn his $1.7 million salary for at least one of the three seasons on his contract, but simply couldn’t allow him to continue to erode the team’s foundation.

Woodcroft, on the other hand, faces a whole different set of expectations. As the third period of the Oilers’ 4-1 loss Wednesday night wound down, GM Ken Holland came to the gut-wrenching realization that he was going to have to fire a coach mid-season for the first time in his career. Because, like in Montreal, things were going off the rails. After starting the season 16-5-0, then cratering, the Oilers looked as though they had found their game again, only to lose the first two games back after the all-star break. The Oilers simply cannot have another season of Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl in their primes without accomplishing something. And Holland feared that if he let things go much longer, the Oilers would find themselves so far out of the playoff race, they wouldn’t have been able to recover. So Woodcroft will be expected to come in and change the course quickly and dramatically and lead this team to the kind of success of which it believes it’s capable.

“I’m hoping today can have an impact,” Holland said. “You start to win, you start to get some confidence and some swagger. We’ve lost our confidence. We’ve lost our swagger. We’ve been chasing the game for two months. As we’re sitting here today, I felt I needed to do something to see if we could get a different result, a better result. Now we watch.”

One thing both St-Louis and Woodcroft presumably have in common is that they would like their interim tags to drop after this season. St-Louis spoke about coaching concepts rather than systems. He wants to give his players room to be creative within parameters. He spoke about how, as was the case when he played, observers will doubt them at their peril. He does not have formal coaching experience, but he will be a quick study. “I’m not coming here as a substitute teacher,” St-Louis said. “I’m here to show what I can do and we’ll settle the rest this summer.”

Canadiens’ hockey operations president Jeff Gorton knows St-Louis from their days together with the New York Rangers. His relationship with Hughes came from their kids playing hockey together. And Hughes’ relationship with St-Louis grew from the same place. Nobody really knows what St-Louis will accomplish as a coach, but they do know their new bench boss burns with a Rocket Richard-like fire. “If you were in our room when (St-Louis) just spoke to the team, you would have had goosebumps,” Gorton said. “Because there’s a certain vibe, a certain energy. He wants this job. We all say interim, well, he’s putting it on the line here. His whole life has been about, ‘I’ll show you.’ Our players felt that, I felt it. I’ve always felt it about him, Kent feels that way. I think it’s going to help everybody. It’s a chance for our players to get a second chance in the last 37 games and have their season mean something.”