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Duff: Why McLellan Just Might Be Right Guy For Red Wings Job

Owns .637 winning percentage as NHL head coach

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4 weeks ago

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Todd McLellan, Red Wings
New Red Wings coach Todd McLellan comes to Detroit with a wealth of success and experience as an NHL head coach.

I’ve been lucky enough to know Todd McLellan for more than 40 years. Back when we first met in 1984, he was a 17-year-old center with the WHL Saskatoon Blades and I was a rookie beat writer on my first daily newspaper job.

What was true about him back then remains true today. McLellan is someone who approaches life with a positive outlook. He sees possibilities and is open to new ways of looking at things, alternative methods to problem solving. He’ll greet every day with a smile on his face and an excitement to stare down the challenges that lay ahead for him.

This is what he’ll be bringing to the Detroit Red Wings.

In other words, his day-to-day approach figures to be significantly different to that of Derek Lalonde’s paint by numbers formula. And that might be just what the doctor ordered for a confused Red Wings club that doesn’t seem to know what their identity as a team is supposed to be.

Another factor to like about McLellan – he’s won at every of his NHL stops and has done so while running his own show and not only as a staff member who is part of another coach’s success story.

McLellan Bringing Winning Resume To Red Wings

At San Jose, he’d guide the Sharks to three 50+ win seasons and a trio of first-place finishes. He won 47 games with the Edmonton Oilers in 2016-17. Twice, he’d take the Los Angeles Kings to 40+ win campaigns.

McLellan brings a Stanley Cup-winning pedigree to Detroit. He was an assistant coach with the Red Wings in 2007-08, the more recent season in which the club won the Cup.

At one point during that Cup run, it came to McLellan’s attention that whenever we had a conversation the morning of a game, the Wings would win that night. If we didn’t speak on game day, Detroit lost.

From that point onward, every game day morning skate, McLellan made it his mission to seek me out. We might talk about what we had for breakfast, how our flight was, or what we watched on TV the night before. But words would always be exchanged.

Former Red Wings Player Turned McLellan On To Coaching

At one time an NHL prospect as a player with the New York Islanders, who drafted him in 1986, a series of shoulder injuries would crush McLellan’s dreams of making the NHL on the ice. It was in of all places the Netherlands where the coaching bug first bit him. And oddly enough, a former Red Wings player was  instrumental in making that happen.

“I was injured playing pro and went to school (at the University of Saskatchewan) and I wasn’t too sure that I wanted to be a student,” McLellan once told me.

“I still had an itch to play, so I went to Europe and played for a year there (with Utrecht). A new coach (Doug McKay) moved in with me halfway through the season.”

McKay won a Stanley Cup as a player with the 1949-50 Red Wings.

“I had two months with him,” McLellan recalled. “We’d spend time in the morning planning, preparing for practice and pre-scouting. I really enjoyed it and I thought it was a way for me to stay in the game. All my friends were still playing and I envied them.”

He would accept his first coaching position soon after, with North Battleford of the Saskatchewan Junior Hockey League.

“Certainly, the Saskatchewan Junior League wasn’t the NHL, but I was still involved in hockey,” he said.

Yzerman Familiar With McLellan’s Work

McLellan advanced to Swift Current of the WHL and then Houston of the IHL, where he won a Turner Cup title. Then the Wings would bring him into the NHL in 2005 as a member of Mike Babcock’s staff.

Red Wings GM Steve Yzerman was entering his last season as a player, so got to observe McLellan from that perspective and later as a member of the Detroit front office.

Evidently, he liked what he saw from McLellan.

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