Barry's Back in Town

When Barry Trotz took over as the Caps' coach in May of 2014, he dove right into the job with a summer of long workdays in which he spent hours watching his new team's games from the previous half season. Putting those games and players under a microscope enabled Trotz to figure out what he needed to do to get the ship turned around.

"I think they played north-south with Bruce [Boudreau]," said Trotz after that summer crash course of watching video of the 2013-14 Washington Capitals. "They just got off the ice as quick as possible. The last couple of years, when we talked about [playing against] the Caps, we talked about them going east-west; a lot of pull-ups. If you take away the power play and take away the rush game, you're going to have decent success against them. We never ever talked about them going hard to the net like San Jose does. Never.
"We need to get that mentality of hard to the net, like Detroit and teams like that. We need to make the playoffs, which I believe we will. But at the same time, if we're going to be good in April, May and June, we need to get 60 or 80 games of pounding this day in and day out until we get this. We're not going away. The coaching staff is going to pound this until we get it. There are some behaviors we still have to change."
It took a few years of pounding - of "pounding the rock" as Trotz would say - but they got it, and they got good in April, May and June. The behaviors changed, and a Stanley Cup was hoisted last spring, and shortly after that, Trotz's four-year tenure behind the Washington bench came to an end. He left to take over the reins of the New York Islanders, taking veteran goalie guru Mitch Korn and estimable assistant coach Lane Lambert with him, to the surprise of few. The three men worked together for years in Nashville before coming to Washington nearly five years ago now.

On Friday night, that trio of ex-Caps coaches will return to D.C. for the first time since joining the Isles, and they'll do so almost four years to the day since they returned to Nashville for the first time, in their first season with the Caps. That Jan. 16, 2015 game in Music City didn't end well - the Preds won, 4-3 - and the Caps are hoping to spoil the returns of Trotz and company on Friday, too.
"Obviously we see every game as a normal game and try to get ready as a normal game," says Caps center Nicklas Backstrom, "whether there is a former coach or a playoff game, whatever. But obviously we all know what Barry has done for us here, for us as players and for this city. I think it's pretty special, so I'm sure he will be well received here [Friday] and he should be, because he deserves it. But after that, I hope we can save him a couple of bucks."
In late spring of 2014, the Capitals were at a crossroads. They missed the playoffs in 2013-14, and that subpar season resulted in the dismissals of longtime general manager George McPhee and head coach Adam Oates. The Caps finished the season 21st in goals against, and there were some who believed the team had already squandered the best years of Alex Ovechkin and possibly Backstrom's career as well.
When Nashville suddenly jettisoned Trotz after a decade and a half as the only coach the Predators had ever known, the fit seemed perfect. The Caps had been Trotz's first NHL employer, hiring him as a Western League scout back in the late 1980s, a few years after a brief and ill-fated tryout as a defenseman in Washington's preseason training camp. He was known as a defensive-minded coach in his days with the Preds, and he had shaped and molded the team's culture since before day one. Nashville general manager David Poile hired Trotz to coach the Predators a year before the team played its first game.

The Caps were looking for someone who could improve their defense and alter their culture, and Trotz was available. In the late spring of 2014, Trotz was hired and he and Caps GM Brian MacLellan - promoted to the position after a decade as McPhee's assistant GM - set in motion the changes that eventually culminated in the Caps claiming the Cup four years later.
"I'd be lying if I said I knew Mac really well," said Trotz back then. "I won't know Mac really well until we go through adversity together. When it's going good, we'll be great together. When it's not going good, that's when you find out about relationships. It's sort of like love and marriage. Everybody loves their wife until you have a fight."
Trotz coached the Caps for 328 games, and his Washington teams had only two losing streaks longer than three games. The longest of those, a five-game slide (0-4-1) came in his first month on the job here when he was still trying to get a handle on personnel and getting the players to buy into his system.

Although Trotz and MacLellan didn't know one another well when they began working together nearly five years ago, Trotz believed from the start that it would work, and he was ultimately correct.
"The reason I believe it will work is because Mac has no illusions of what the problem is," said Trotz back in May of 2014. "He's not putting his head in the sand. He has made that clear to ownership. And I'm an outsider coming in and I've said the same thing.
"We're on the same program and we're going to work together to get this done. I can't fix the problem alone. This is something that needs the pyramid of the coach and management and ownership together and everybody has each other back. I think that might be the strength and the reality of what is about to happen here. It will be ugly at times but you'll have lots to talk about."

Now in his first season with the Islanders, Trotz is a heavy favorite to win the Jack Adams Award as the league's top coach. The 2017-18 Islanders missed the playoffs by 17 points and gave up the most goals of any team in the league. You can bet that Trotz spent this past summer watching video of the 2017-18 Islanders, as he did four summers ago in Washington. And you can argue that he has affected a greater and swifter turnaround with the Isles than he did with the Capitals.
This year's model of the Islanders is the stingiest team in the league, which is bad news for a Caps team that has been scuffling to score for a couple of weeks now.
"I think he is very detailed and I think that is a big part," says Caps defenseman John Carlson. "That is one of our strengths, even this year as well, is being detailed in every facet. Nothing gets overlooked. I don't want to speculate on what happened before or what is happening now, because I don't know, but he's obviously got a good track record as a coach and he seems to succeed. He has instilled a lot of text book things that we do now that have worked wonders, and I'm sure he is doing the same thing with them."
"He is a good coach," says Caps coach Todd Reirden, who worked under Trotz as an assistant and associate coach over the last four seasons. "He does a really good job. The system that he is using, I'm quite familiar with, and I'd like to say that we helped build it together amongst our coaching staff. It's a good system. It works, and he is getting buy-in from his players and I'm not surprised.
"They made some changes up at the top and brought in people that have won in the past, and they're doing the same thing right now. It will be a very tough game [Friday] and the first time back. It will be an awesome situation with a video tribute, which is so well deserved. And then from that point on, we're going to play some hockey, I hope, the way that we can play."
Once Trotz finished watching those videos of the '13-14 Caps four summers ago, he got set to run Washington's summer development camp for the first time. And when that camp concluded in early July, he made a journey northward to Portland, Maine, for a reunion of the 1993-94 Calder Cup champion Portland Pirates.
When you are part of a championship team, you're eternally bonded to those players and the staff members who were part of that team. Trotz is big on bonds and championship reunions, and now he's got another championship group to which he will be forever attached.
Although he is coaching another team now, the championship Caps are grateful for his presence and his direction and guidance here over the last four seasons, and they'll eagerly embrace him at those reunions years and decades from now.

"I'll definitely be proud to have been on his team," says Caps goalie Braden Holtby. "He is a great coach, a great person. He helped our team and helped myself out a ton in his time here. I have nothing but the utmost respect and thankfulness for what he did with us, and he ultimately brought a championship.
"It will be nice for him and for us to put an end to that chapter and we can both move on. It's a little late in the year; you'd expect to have played a little earlier - and not just him, but Lane and Mitch as well. They've done a lot and it means a lot to us for them to get the red carpet treatment. In saying that though, that's a complete sidenote on the game. And we are still going to focus on that it is going to be a good challenge and we are going to have to play a good game."