Jun 26, 2023; Nashville, Tennessee, USA; Incoming Nashville Predators general manager Barry Trotz talks with members of the media on the red carpet before the 2023 NHL Awards at Bridgestone Arena. Mandatory Credit: Christopher Hanewinckel-Imagn Images
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Dec 20, 2005/vol. 59, issue 14
Path to Preds is quite a Trotz
Nashville coach finally sees rewards after years of patience and perseverance
BY MARK BRENDER
Senior Writer
Barry Trotz is harried. He left his cell phone in the car after driving his four kids to school this morning and now he’s back on the road heading to the airport for the team flight to Washington leaves in 45 minutes.
Fortunately, Trotz is an even-keel kind of guy and does well with multi-tasking.
“I have to,” he says good naturedly. His five-year-old son Nolan has Down Syndrome and keeps the family hopping. Trotz, of course, wouldn’t have it any other way.
At least the family is all hopping in one place.
A career travelling man, Trotz never saw this coming. ‘This’ would be Trotz’s seventh NHL season in Nashville, his ninth living in the city if you include the lockout and the year he spent scouting prior to the Preds’ inaugural season in 1998-99.
It’s the longest he’s ever lived in one place since he was a boy.
Among NHL coaches, Trotz now has the second-longest tenure with his current team next to Buffalo’s Lindy Ruff.
Given the remarkable on-ice success of both teams this season, it makes the post-lockout world even more of a reward for those who waited for results…and waited…and waited…
“Through the tough times he continued to teach and encourage and be patient,” says Predators center Greg Johnson. “I think you’re seeing the results of that now.”
Trotz describes himself as a “fair” coach. It must be an organizational trait. His good fortune is due in no small part to the Patience of Poile (that’s GM David, son of Bud), a man who sought the counsel of his peers when picking a coach for his expansion team and then went running off in the opposite direction.
Poile’s colleagues told him to get someone experienced. Poile thanked them for their advice and then hired a guy who had never coached or played an NHL game in his life.
But this was an improbable story right from the beginning. Trotz’s journey from small-town Canadian prairie boy to NHL coach began when he didn’t have enough pocket change to go home for the holiday weekend.
He always worked hard enough; as a teenager, Trotz spent 12-hour days in the summers hoisting railway ties and fixing the tracks for the Canadian Pacific Railway, where his dad was a mechanic.
In the fall of 1979, he was a 17-year-old student/hockey player/all-around athlete at Notre Dame College School in Wilcox, Sask. (He set a provincial record in the 200 meters that held for two decades as lore has it – not that you’d know it to see him today).
It was maybe 250 miles from Notre Dame to Trotz’s family home in Dauphin, Man – too far and expensive to head to on Thanksgiving weekend – but a lot closer to Regina, where he and a friend heard the Western League’s Pats were having a tryout camp.
Keen for some extra ice time, they hitchhiked the 30 miles and Trotz, an undersized defenseman, shocked himself by making the team. Al MacInnis was his first roommate.
After four years in Regina, Trotz did enough to get a look from then-Washington scout Jack Button, but not much more. Still, Button saw something in him and kept in touch. Trotz coached university and junior hockey and eventually started scouting for the Caps, where Poile was GM.
Up the ladder he went, from assistant in the ‘A’ to coach for the Caps’ farm team to a Calder Cup champion.
When Poile hired Trotz in Nashville, he had already known him for 15 years.
“I trust him as much as I trust anybody,” Poile says.
But even trust has its limits. Trotz thought Poile lost his two years ago. Nashville started 2002-03 with two wins in first 19 games, then played well against Minnesota and lost Game 20.
“There were a few people on that trip that didn’t necessarily come on every trip,” Trotz recalls. Something had to give. “And I thought boy, it’s probably going to be me.”
But instead of firing Trotz, Poile saved him. He traded goalie Mike Dunham for Marek Zidlicky, Rem Murray and Tomas Kloucek, and Trotz survived to thrive another day. Finally, that day has come.
He’s proud of the culture the Predators’ organization has developed–hard-working, respectful, united. Even the kids in the minors feel it:
“They don’t just play for an NHL team, they play for the Nashville Predators. And I don’t know how to articulate that, but there’s a difference.”
It’s a positive reflection on team chemistry, Trotz says, that it seems like Paul Kariya has been around for 10 years. Yet it must also be a reflection on the organization that the coach will soon be able to say the same – and have the record book back him up.
Trotz is living proof that good guys might not finish first – even if they are expansion guys – but they won’t finish last forever. All
too rare is the franchise that allows that organic process to happen.