Redden had a flashback to his first season in Ottawa last weekend while coaching his 15-year-old daughter’s hockey team back in British Columbia.
“I was standing there leaning on the net with one of the other coaches. The girls, they had a day off before, so they're doing some hard skating, but I remember one game against Philadelphia, we got beat 5-0,” said Redden.
“That was my first year, and it would have been early in the season, and Jacques obviously wasn't happy about that, and our performance, and we ended up doing some hard skating the next day, but there's a picture in the paper of Jacques leaning on the net with one arm on his stick, and I was standing there the same way. All I could think about was Jacques in that moment,” laughed Redden.
“But yeah, he demanded a lot. He treated us very well and was a good guy in so many ways, but he demanded a certain effort and attitude, and a work ethic for sure, to come and be ready and be professional. And you know, that really helped us a lot as a young team.”
Van Allen had just been acquired by the Senators before that same season Redden began his career, the first season the franchise ever made the playoffs. “When I got traded here, I didn’t know anybody on the team, and it was my first time being traded, so it was a hard time,” remembers Van Allen.
Van Allen also left behind a young family back in Anaheim. He hadn’t been in Ottawa very long before his oldest son was diagnosed with autism.
”Jacques was, I would say, probably the perfect coach for me at that time, because he had a lot of patience and understanding,” said Van Allen. “He was patient not only with me, but with a lot of the young guys too, he let us kind of try and develop and figure out what kind of players we were going to be in the NHL.”
A year later, Phillips arrived, joining Redden on the blueline and a young, emerging core of Senators up front in Marian Hossa, 18, Alexei Yashin, 23, Radek Bonk, 23, and Daniel Alfredsson, 24.
Well, mostly on the blueline. Martin played the young Phillips as a forward at times during the second half of his rookie season. “Not what I expected was going to happen, but at the same time, it was an opportunity for me to get into the lineup. [The coaches] call your name and you do whatever you can to help the team win and make a difference in any way you can,” said Phillips.
“But he was a great teacher, certainly with a few different assistant coaches over the years, but coming in as a young guy, he was a great coach, a great teacher of the game. That really paid dividends for me as my career progressed.”
“He was a pretty reserved guy, wasn’t a yeller or screamer on the bench,” described Redden. “I think he did all his work kind of getting us ready or preparing in practice, and we had a certain style… it was a lot of work to get everyone on the same page and learn the system.”
“He recognized that we were a young team figuring out how to score, so he had to put a system in place that would help us be successful,” said Van Allen.
“He really [emphasized] taking care of the puck, taking advantage of the opportunities when you’d get them, but not at the risk of giving up a lot of chances,” added Phillips. “It was being very responsible with the puck defensively. He’d often say, if we have to win the game in the last minute of the game, then that’s what we’re going to do. He really instilled that in us.”
“Jacques’ big thing was we obviously worked very hard in practice and off the ice,” described Van Allen. “People would mock us for the bike rides after the game, but Jacques was big into pushing yourself as hard as you can, taking short shifts, trying to play with pace,” said Van Allen.
“I think a lot of teams were [emphasizing fitness] and had different approaches to it. But I think the one area we were unique, that some players made fun of us for, [was] when we were jumping on the bike after the game and getting rid of the lactic acid,” said Phillips. “The interviews on the bikes, that was a bit of an Ottawa trademark there for a few years.”
Martin brought in Lorne Goldenberg as a conditioning coach for the Senators, who he had worked with back in Quebec and Colorado. “[He] was a huge part of it, coming in and being ready to go, our fitness testing and being in shape,” said Redden.
“Always pushing and searching for new techniques, I think Jacques was great at that too. You look at now, how they really scientifically look at how you want to exert your energy in terms of practice days and days off, I think Jacques was really in tune with that side of it too, knowing how much to push.”
“He thought that would give us an advantage over teams,” said Van Allen. “And it did, if you look at our record when we had a lead after the second period, it was pretty much as if you could go home, we were going to put that one away.”
A couple of years after Van Allen, Redden, and Philips became Senators, players like Mike Fisher (drafted 48th overall in 1998), Martin Havlát (drafted 26th overall in 1999), and Anton Volchenkov (drafted 21st overall in 2000) would arrive from the pipeline — along with Jason Spezza and Zdeno Chara, acquired from the Islanders in return for Yashin.
In 2002–03, those Senators won the Presidents’ Trophy after winning 52 games, still tied for their most ever in a season in franchise history. They scored the third-most goals in the league that year, but Martin’s focus on defence, fitness, and the little details remained.
“I think [the style] changed a little bit, just by the nature of the guys that were coming in,” said Phillips. “Not necessarily in Jacques’ approach to it, but it was just a product of some of those players that came in.”
“If you’re going to stay out on the ice over a minute, you’re going to play slow, you’re not going to win, and that always stood out with me, and I try and take that into my coaching,” said Van Allen, who has spent his post-playing career as a coach, mostly with the Carleton Ravens of U SPORTS.
“We had some fun practices with him, talking about lengths of shifts, we were actually practicing changing [lines],” Havlát told TSN 1200’s Mornings on Thursday. “Very similar game to it used to be, and some things don’t change. Lengths of shifts are very important.”
