Keeping it together through the years

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This article was published 06/09/2017 (3133 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Some days, talking about his brother Brad is the most natural thing in the world for Kelly McCrimmon.

On other days, like Tuesday afternoon, McCrimmon answered the phone in his Las Vegas office and patiently listened to a reporter’s questions. It wasn’t easy — perhaps because the anniversary was too close — to keep it together.

Today, six years to the day after a plane crash claimed the lives of Brad McCrimmon and 43 members of the Lokomotiv Yaroslavl team travelling to Minsk for its season opener in the Kontinental Hockey League, Kelly McCrimmon will be reminded of that terrible day more than once.

“There are people who always reach out on (Sept.) 7th to show respect or recognize the tragedy,” McCrimmon said. “So, there will be some of that. Every year I’ve always been in training camp or that type of thing, so you’re always busy, which was likely a good thing. There’s not a lot of time to sit and dwell.

“Obviously, it’ll be on my mind and I’ll think about it on the days leading up to it and on the seventh, but I know I’ll be busy here with training camp now in Las Vegas. That’s exactly what Brad would expect me to be doing, focusing on the task at hand.”

That’s the essence of what made the McCrimmons tick. They were always all-in.

Brad, the veteran NHLer whose knowledge of the game and maniacal devotion to fitness helped to keep him in the bigs for 18 seasons (he once played almost an entire game and overtime at the Memorial Cup tournament when his team was short-staffed on the blue-line).

And Kelly, his teammate in Brandon during the late ’70s, who didn’t have the physical tools of his older brother but could match him when it came to a hard-nosed but thoughtful approach to the game.

As the sons of Byron and Faye, who ran a family farm near Plenty, Sask., the plan was always for the boys to return to their roots. Yet hockey always seemed to be part of the equation.

“I’m sure it was a direct product of how we grew up,” Kelly said. “My dad was a real good senior player, a good coach. He had a real successful senior team called the Rosetown Red Wings, which was about 50 miles from where our farm was.

“We were always with Dad at his games. Hockey was a big part of everything that we did growing up. And hockey and farming were the things we knew the best and loved the most.”

Then, fate intervened.

Brad, as an elite defenceman, would go on to play 1,222 regular-season games in the NHL and helped the Calgary Flames to a Stanley Cup in 1989.

After he retired, he served for 12 seasons as an assistant coach at three stops in the NHL — getting his first gig as a head coach with the WHL’s Saskatoon Blades — before returning to the NHL as an assistant with Mike Babcock in Detroit.

Kelly, meanwhile, finished his playing career at the University of Michigan before rising through the ranks of coaching and management to become one of the most respected operators in major junior hockey.

Through it all, the brothers had an extraordinarily close bond, and talked almost every day, usually on the phone.

It isn’t hard for Kelly, now the assistant GM of the Vegas Golden Knights and owner of the WHL’s Brandon Wheat Kings, to imagine what a call like that would sound like today.

“He’d want a report on the Wheat Kings, on how things were going there, and then I think he would have a lot of excitement and pride for the opportunity I have with Vegas,” McCrimmon said. “We’d likely be talking about what to expect at NHL training camps, those types of things…

“Yeah, we talked lots. It wouldn’t be every day, it would be based on the travel he would have or I would have. We were on the phone lots but because we both worked in hockey. It was more on the phone than it was in person ever. It was the nature of jobs. I’m sure we were the persons that each other talked to the most.”

The brothers had rewarding careers, but they aspired to achieve more. Brad desperately wanted to be a head coach and accepting the KHL job was supposed to be an important step in reaching that goal. Kelly wanted to work in the NHL, but the right opportunity never seemed to materialize.

Brad was enthusiastic about the new job as he flew to Russia in the summer of 2011.

“He’d been an assistant coach in the National Hockey League for a number of years and I think he wanted to be a head coach, wanted to run his own program,” Kelly said. “I think he was hoping if he had success there it might help him get a head coaching opportunity back in North America in the NHL. He thoroughly enjoyed every aspect of it.”

Brad was 52 when he died and the tragedy has had lasting implications for his family, particularly for his widow Maureen, daughter Carlin and son Liam.

His brother has struggled with Brad’s absence, too, but after resigning himself to never reaching the NHL, he suddenly found opportunity on his doorstep. In 2016, the Toronto Maple Leafs tried to hire him for their management team and earlier this year, multiple teams were bidding for his services.

Ultimately, he chose the Golden Knights, a build-it-from-scratch operation he knew Brad would have relished.

“For anyone who’s been through something like this, you get through it and past it, yet they’re never far from your thoughts,” McCrimmon said. “I went to visit my parents (in Saskatoon) last week before I came down to Las Vegas.

“Well, driving there and back, I thought about him a lot. So there’s always reminders and again, because we both worked in hockey our entire lives, there’s a lot of parallels with experiences I might be going through now that I know he’s been through or would have thought of, or might have talked about.”

mike.sawatzky@freepress.mb.caTwitter: @sawa14