Leading men

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 07/01/2012 (5016 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

BUFFALO, N.Y. — The fascination with the Winnipeg Jets extends in a lot of directions, including the makeup of the team.

It’s a makeup head coach Claude Noel frequently says he likes and one that he says is well-led.

How does Noel know this and what does he mean by it?

“In the end, it is about the room,” said Noel, who has won professional championships as both player and coach. “I’ve sat in the room and I’ve won with players in those rooms and it is about you. Yes, the coach, he steers it, but the more that goes on, it’s really about the relationships you have in the room and the accountability between the players.

“That gets driven by you early in the year but you pass it on and it’s driven by them.”

In Winnipeg, Noel’s method has changed little from his season spent coaching the AHL’s Manitoba Moose to this year’s first full-time NHL assignment.

The 56-year-old native of Kirkland Lake, Ont., takes stock of his roster, sets the overall game plan and then starts the dialogue with his captain and his players.

Early in the season, Noel pushes hard on his strategic agenda, all the while meeting regularly with the team’s captain — in the present case, Andrew Ladd — and other leaders to get feedback, provide the logic to what they’re doing and direction for ways to tack through the daily ebbs and flows of a season.

His eye is constantly in observation mode but Noel prefers the frank one-on-one encounters at least once a month.

“I don’t buffalo players,” he said. “I just want to give it to you honestly.”

The process for these Jets is incomplete, just halfway through the season as of today.

It has ebbed and flowed as he and the team have expected it would, each new to the other, and that includes this week’s troubled waters from two resounding defeats in Montreal and Toronto.

But for the dynamics within the team, talk and their body language suggests that the ice has been broken between camps that were strangers as recently as this summer.

The process, according to a key member of the Jets’ leadership group, is working.

“It’s played out pretty well,” said Jets defenceman Mark Stuart, one of the team’s alternate captains. “On any team, really, the coach is going to take care of his business at the beginning. He’s going to be on guys and try to get his plan in place.

“But after a certain point, it all depends on the team. After a certain point, the guys need to take over because it is our locker-room, it is our team.

“It’s something we have to police and I think we’ve done a pretty good job of taking that over for now. Obviously you still need to get your ass kicked once in a while by your coach but it should be taken care of in the room first, really.”

Goalie Chris Mason, at 35 the oldest member of the team by nearly four years, is no timid voice in the Jets locker-room and on the question of leadership, he said the big picture is every bit as important as the daily “crisis.”

Mason reminded a questioner that the adjustment issues for the former Atlanta Thrashers, 17 of whom are now Jets, are extensive, from coaching to style to scrutiny to just plain living.

“It’s been a pretty big adjustment for everybody,” Mason said. “(Noel) understands that and he likes to give quite a bit of responsibility in the room to sort certain things out.

“A lot of times it’s older guys and our captains. Our captain has been a great leader for this team. One of his strongest attributes is how hard he works and how he carries himself.

“When you lead by example, that’s the best way for people to follow. When the leader has the character, the work ethic, that’s the standard for what’s expected of everybody.”

The same message came from Stuart.

“We have a good group of guys that know how to (lead) but it all starts with our captain,” Stuart said. “His career speaks for itself, the things he’s done speak for themselves. He’s a guy we all look up to and we look to him to lead us and I think he’s done a great job with that.”

Ladd, now 26, has emerged as the leader of the group but not a single person consulted for this story suggested he’s anything close to the dominating kind of personality a la Mark Messier or Chris Pronger or even more familiar to Winnipeggers, a Mike Keane.

The captain himself said this week that’s not him and that wouldn’t work for him.

“It can’t be one person,” Ladd said. “It’s a group of people and I think the best way to do it is by your actions, how hard you work in practice and the little things you do during games.

“There are times to step up and speak but you have to have different guys doing that. If it’s one guy all the time, it starts to get old and it goes in one ear and out the other.”

The generalities are about as far as Ladd or any other member of the team would go when asked to talk about the specifics of team leadership, like who says or does what to whom.

And that’s no surprise. The locker-room is a private, confidential place and anyone who tries to invite, inject or weasel themselves into it rarely gets anywhere.

Still, the Jets leadership pattern is evident.

“There are guys who are more talkers,” Ladd said. “They try to get energy going. There are more serious guys who just go about their business and do their talking on the ice. I might fall under that category. Usually when those guys speak, it has more impact because it’s not all the time.”

Those interactions and the attitudes they develop are the critical phase.

“One of the keys to coaching is that you have to get your players to care like you care,” Noel said. “When you do, they care about each other like that, and when they do and they care about the outcome, that’s when you’ve really got something — something that can win.”

And that would be well-led.

tim.campbell@freepress.mb.ca