Rexrode: Predators coach Peter Laviolette is ornery, intense, beloved

ANAHEIM, Calif. — Peter Laviolette walked out of his office and toward an elevator on May 7 at Bridgestone Arena, his right hand on the back of his 14-year old daughter, Elisabeth.

He was smiling. This might seem natural for a person sharing a moment with a family member, shortly after achieving something at work significant enough to make a city go bonkers. But we’re talking about Peter Laviolette.

This is a man whose default setting is “cold glare” when he enters a room. A seemingly humorless man, a professional sourpuss, a coach who can detect bad intentions in the most harmless of questions.

I’ve seen him get unnecessarily short with just about everyone who covers the Nashville Predators, the team Laviolette will direct in Sunday’s Game 2 of the Western Conference finals against the Anaheim Ducks. This includes the guys who write for the team website. And I’ve wanted to yell: “They’re your co-workers, Peter! Asking about a line change!”

So this glimpse of Laviolette, a smiling father enjoying the victory over St. Louis that made Predators history, brought with it the question of just how different he is from the brick wall he projects to the public. And another one: Is this latest Laviolette push toward a Stanley Cup, with a young and gifted Predators nucleus, the start of something that will last?

His first three NHL head coaching jobs saw instant turnarounds and immediate success, and all three ended with Laviolette fired and trashed publicly by the people who sent him on his way. He has a knack for inspiring vitriol.

He also has a claim as the best U.S.-born coach in National Hockey League history. He’s the second to win 500 NHL games. He won the Stanley Cup with the Carolina Hurricanes in 2006 and took the Philadelphia Flyers to the Cup Final in 2010, losing to Chicago.

And if Nashville can beat the Ducks three more times, he will become just the fourth coach in NHL history to take three different franchises to the Stanley Cup Final. Scotty Bowman, Dick Irvin and Mike Keenan are the others.

That’s elite company. This is a remarkable career, especially when you consider how it started. And Laviolette, 52, doesn’t just inspire passion in the superiors who turn on him. That’s clear if you ask around enough.

“He never should have been let go by the Carolina Hurricanes — that was a travesty,” said Aaron Ward, a key member of that 2006 Carolina team.

“Just a great person and coach,” said Alan Hahn, who covered Laviolette’s two-season stint with the New York Islanders from 2001-03 for Newsday.

“I’ve played for a lot of coaches, and some of them I think are good people, and some of them I don’t think are good people at all,” said Mike Commodore, another of Laviolette’s Cup-winning Hurricanes. “Peter’s truly a good guy. That’s the main thing I will always remember and appreciate about Peter Laviolette.”

'It wasn't fair at all'

Bob Luccini has known Laviolette well since coaching him at Franklin (Mass.) High in the 1970s, but he has known the Laviolette family for much longer. He played beer league hockey with Laviolette’s father, Big Pete. Big Pete’s father, Art, owned Art’s Grocery in town.

Big Pete ran that store before getting into the garage-door business, and Laviolette had plans to join his father after earning his business degree in 1986 from Westfield (Mass.) State College. He also played hockey for the school’s Division III program, which struggled to compete with most teams on its schedule.

“They’d be down double digits in some games,” Luccini recalled. “But Peter would still be out there diving in front of slap shots.”

A New England-based Minnesota North Stars scout named Al “Smokey” Cerrone happened to watch Laviolette play as a senior. Cerrone wasn’t there to scout him, but he loved his intensity. That led to an invitation to North Stars camp and a minor league contract with the Indianapolis Checkers.

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By 1988, Laviolette was a member of the U.S. Olympic hockey team and saw his lone NHL stint in an 11-year playing career. The final tally was 12 games with the New York Rangers and 594 games with six minor-league teams. And it’s usually the athletes who have to grind for everything who make the best coaches.

Laviolette was a coaching success from the start, winning stints in Wheeling, W.Va., and Providence. That’s where he and his wife, Kristen, met. He spent a year as an assistant with the Boston Bruins before Mike Milbury hired him to take over the Islanders. His first day of training camp as an NHL head coach was Sept. 11, 2001, in Lake Placid, N.Y.

“A couple of the young guys showed up late to the morning practice and Peter got right into them,” Hahn recalled. “All of us beat writers were like, ‘Oh, we’ve got a big story for tomorrow, he’s already screaming at players, how great is this?’”

A bigger story emerged that morning. The team and press corps ended up having to stay several more days than planned in Lake Placid after the September 11 attacks, and in that time Hahn saw both the intensity and personal touch of Laviolette as a coach. The Islanders were on a seven-year streak of missing the playoffs, but Laviolette’s first team earned 96 points in a startling turnaround.

Both of his teams made the playoffs. But after his second season, Milbury fired him and said: “We were not an inspired group in the end.”

Of course, that was Milbury’s seventh coach firing in seven years as GM — including firing himself twice — and this is a league that loves to fire its coaches. The NHL has seen 38 dismissals in the past 10 years, according to the Associated Press, more than any other major sports league and twice as many as the NFL.

“Peter just kind of accepted it, but it hurt him bad,” Hahn said. “He was blamed for a lot of things that weren’t his fault, and it wasn’t fair at all. In my mind, he’s the best Islanders coach since (four-time Cup winner) Al Arbour.”

'He's another John Wooden'

But that set the pattern for Laviolette. He moved on to Carolina and shrewdly put together a 2005-06 team that was small, fast and built to take advantage of the new rules coming out of the 2004-05 lockout. He motivated and got things out of players they didn’t think possible, which is the essence of coaching.

“I did more offensive drills as a defenseman that year than I did the rest of my career cumulatively,” Ward said. “It was not the easiest relationship at first, but by the end of that year I would have named my kid Peter Laviolette Jr.”

It was a magical run to the Cup, a team heavy on also-rans, or as Ward put it: “Gilligan’s Island with all the castoff defensemen we had.”

Laviolette made sure the team bonded with Monday Night Football gatherings and poker nights. He had a player taking pictures on trips all season, sworn to secrecy, and used them to put together a motivational video for the start of the playoffs.

The Hurricanes rallied around Julia Rowe, the daughter of neighbors of Laviolette, who was battling leukemia at the time and passed away in 2008. “Relentless” was their Julia-inspired buzzword, and that’s how they had to play to win a championship.

“A lot of that run was due directly to Peter Laviolette, and I don’t think he gets enough credit for that,” said Luke DeCock, the Raleigh News & Observer columnist who covered the Hurricanes at the time.

“A lot of coaches are good tacticians, but Peter actually gets players to believe in a system,” said Pete Friesen, that team’s trainer. “He can outline a whole freaking process and execute it, step by step. I’ve been a trainer for 37 years and he’s the best coach I’ve ever worked with. And I don’t just mean coach, I mean human being. In my mind, he’s another John Wooden.”

There’s comments like that. And then there’s Carolina owner Peter Karmanos Jr., telling reporters shortly after firing Laviolette in late 2008: “I didn’t like our coach. His private persona and his public persona were two different things.”

After firing Laviolette three games into the 2013-14 season, three years after the coach got the Flyers to the Cup Final, chairman Ed Snider said, “our training camp, quite frankly, was one of the worst training camps I’ve ever seen.”

Philly media took its shots, too, perhaps dimming Laviolette’s view of that industry. None of it dimmed Predators GM David Poile’s view of Laviolette.

“I know what happened in both situations,” Poile said of Carolina, Philadelphia and his 2014 decision to hire Laviolette. “And I’m very confident in Peter as both as coach and a person. I’m sure you can find some people who don’t like him, but I’m also sure he’s mostly very popular among the players he has coached.”

Intensity, brutal honesty and winning hockey followed Laviolette to Nashville. Now the Predators are chasing a Cup. There’s no telling if this is just the start or if Nashville will be another short stop. Laviolette declined to be interviewed for this, which was no surprise.

But he did talk this week on the phone to Luccini, his old high school coach, who has been a Hurricanes scout since 2006.

“He’s probably one of the nicest, down-to-earth people you’ll ever meet,” Luccini said. “He could be in a room full of people, talking to the president of the United States, and if he saw a person from Franklin he’d leave the president right there and go talk to the person from Franklin. That’s Peter.”

On May 7, he and Elisabeth got into the elevator, and Laviolette nodded to a fan in a Predators jersey.

“What did you think?” Laviolette asked the fan of the win over the Blues.

“That was awesome,” the fan said, and Laviolette cracked another smile before getting off the elevator and back to his business.

Contact Joe Rexrode at jrexrode@tennessean.com and follow him on Twitter @joerexrode.

The Laviolette file

Who: Nashville Predators coach Peter Laviolette

From: Franklin, Mass.

Born: Dec. 7, 1964 (52 years old)

Family: Wife, Kristen; sons, Peter III (19) and Jack (17); daughter, Elisabeth (14)

Coaching career: Laviolette started as head coach of the Wheeling (W.Va.) Nailers of the ECHL in 1997, then was hired to coach the Providence Bruins of the AHL, where he won the league championship in 1999. He spent a season as a Boston Bruins assistant before NHL head coaching stints with the New York Islanders (2001-03), Carolina Hurricanes (2003-08), Philadelphia Flyers (2009-13) and Nashville Predators (2014-present). He won the Stanley Cup with Carolina in 2006 and reached the Stanley Cup Final with Philadelphia in 2010, losing to the Chicago Blackhawks. He also has served Team USA several times, including as head coach of the 2006 Olympics team.

Playing career: A defenseman at Westfield (Mass.) State College, Laviolette was invited to a Minnesota North Stars tryout in 1986 and got a minor-league contract. He went on to play 594 minor-league games for several teams from 1986-97, and 12 NHL games with the New York Rangers in the 1988-89 season. He also played for Team USA at the 1988 and 1994 Winter Olympics.