Experience can make the best teachers.
And the Chicago Blackhawks definitely will have lessons to learn from new coach Jeff Blashill’s staff.
For a team that needs more defense from its forward, Michael Peca is a two-time Selke Trophy winner.
For the young players who need development and continuity, Anders Sörensen coached many of them in Rockford and as the interim Hawks coach last year.
For the top units that need to go from average to good, or from good to great, Mike Vellucci has coached teams at three levels of hockey — NAHL, OHL and AHL — to championships and has worked one-on-one with stars such as Sidney Crosby and Kris Letang.
Each assistant coach talked to the Tribune, breaking down their roles and offering a deep dive into how they hope to help the Hawks emerge from their rebuilding stage.
Michael Peca, offense and penalty kill
Peca gets how most forwards think — he didn’t think of himself as a defender either.
Coming out of junior hockey, where he had 50 goals and 63 assists in his last season with the Ottawa 67’s, he knew his future would be as an offensive winger, not a defensive center.
But that all changed by the time he was at his second NHL stop, with the Buffalo Sabres.
“I still remember when (coach) Ted Nolan told me I was going to start playing against the other teams’ best players in the ’96-97 season,” Peca said.
His first assignment was the Colorado Avalanche’s Peter Forsberg.
“You’re kind of scared out of your mind, initially, and you think you’re going to freeze up and not handle the puck and play this kind of rigid, sit-back defense. And then as my linemates (Jason Dawe and Randy Burridge) and I started to go through this, we’re like, ‘Listen, the quicker we defend and get pucks back … the offensive players, they didn’t care that much about transitioning back to defense.’
“So we found that the quicker we defended without the puck, to get pucks back and create turnovers, the more offense we actually created for ourselves. We were getting more offense than our top line was (getting) in an easier matchup because we were just defending better.
“So that’s going to be the theme (with the Hawks): The better you defend, the more offense you actually create.”
A lot of forwards preach defense in theory, but it’s another thing to commit to it.
If there’s one thing Peca wants to drill, it’s the notion that committing to defense detracts from offense.
“It makes no sense,” Peca, 51, said. “There are great offensive players (who), when they don’t have the puck, can read transition better than most players in the game.
“Playing defense isn’t about setting up a wall and blocking all kinds of shots. When you have speed and skill like the Blackhawks do, you’ve got to change their thought process and what it means to defend. Defense is, how quickly can we get the puck back?
“Also, having more zone time doesn’t guarantee quality chances, but at times players may cheat for offense and cost themselves defensively because they’re not in position. … Cheating below oftentimes has no bearing on getting scoring chances.”
Peca said forwards who skate hard on the backcheck not only allow their defensemen to have a tighter gap but also create a bigger gap for themselves on counter-rushes.
Peca also wants his forwards to carry that defensive mindset even into the offensive zone.
“The forecheck is not an offensive situation,” he said. “Once you deposit that puck into the zone, now it’s a 50-50 puck, and there’s a good chance they get to it first, half the time. So now it’s our stick details, it’s angling details, it’s how do we get that puck back?
“You can almost just say it’s just playing hockey.”
As it stands right now, Peca, who coached the power play for the New York Rangers, will take charge of the Hawks penalty kill.
“As a player, there’s nothing I enjoyed more than killing penalties,” he said.
The Hawks had the 14th-ranked PK (79.3%) last season, and Peca believes he can build on that foundation.
“Special teams, especially penalty killing, is more for smart players than talented players,” he said. “You’ve got to be able to see things before they happen. You’ve got to really build a mental database of … what (teams’) tendencies are, and it helps you think a little bit ahead of what’s going on.”
For all his defense-based philosophies, Peca also has to get more offensive production from a team that ranked 26th with 2.73 goals per game.
So you could argue he’s the assistant coach with the most heavy lifting to do.
But Peca let it be known: He’s built for rebuilds.
“I decided to be a hockey player at a young age, but if I didn’t do anything (else), I knew I wanted to be an architect,” he said. “There’s a thing about the artistry of it and the building concept of it, building things.”
Like he felt as a player on six NHL teams — most of them weren’t wagons: “I love going somewhere and helping it resurrect itself from the ground up,” he said.
“I don’t see this team or this organization on the ground level right now,” Peca said. “They’ve got some really wonderful pieces and it’s already kind of started to ascend. The staff that Jeff has put together, it gives us a really good opportunity to build something from the first day of training camp and enjoy watching how it flourishes.”
Anders Sörensen, defense
Let’s address the elephant in the room.
Sörensen wasn’t shoehorned onto Blashill’s staff because he played the good soldier as interim head coach after the Hawks fired Luke Richardson on Dec. 5 and promoted the former Rockford IceHogs coach.
General manager Kyle Davidson said just after the season that he would find a place for Sörensen in the organization, and Blashill said it would be with him.
“I’ve known Anders for a long, long time,” Blashill said during his introductory news conference on May 27. “I have tons of belief in him as a coach and person. He’s a great fit to help guide our young players. He has relationships with a number of guys, which I think is important because it keeps some continuity on the staff.
“He’s very smart, very calm and I’ve learned a lot from him over the years in different coaching settings, so he’ll stay on staff.”
Sörensen told the Tribune: “Kyle brought it up when he let me know that they were going in that direction, they’re going with Jeff. … I think Jeff had mentioned in his interview process that he’d like to keep me on board in a capacity.”
Sörensen, 50, and Blashill, 51, discussed working together the next day.
And the pair has history, dating to Blashill’s days as coach of the USHL Indiana Ice and Sörensen’s time as a Chicago Mission coach.
“Jeff and I go way back,” Sörensen said. “I got to know him throughout the years of different coaches clinics and seminars, and he’s one of those guys that I’ve always stayed in touch with and just picked his brain in different areas.
“Seemed like we always met up in the summers. Notre Dame used to have a coaches clinic where you’d bring in NHL, AHL, college and junior coaches, so we always used to see each other there and just exchange ideas.”
Sörensen said he “absolutely” got a fair shake from Davidson at the permanent role after finishing 17-30-9 as interim coach, and he learned a lot from the experience.
“It was almost like you get (thrown) right in the fire,” he said. “The biggest difference (from the AHL) is, in the NHL, obviously the stakes are higher, but everything is magnified.”
He didn’t have a training camp to mold the team, but he said players welcomed him and his ideas, and Davidson was “very up front” about his expectations.
“So I felt nothing but support throughout the whole season,” Sörensen said.
Now, Sörensen replaces Kevin Dean as defensive coach.
Sörensen hadn’t yet hashed out with Blashill what the scheme will look like when he spoke with the Tribune, but one of his main charges will be developing a very young blue-line group.
Here are some of the likely options to make the roster out of camp, and their ages before training camp in September.
- Artyom Levshunov: 19
- Sam Rinzel: turns 21 on June 25
- Kevin Korchinski: turns 21 on June 21
- Wyatt Kaiser: 22
- Alex Vlasic: 24
Connor Murphy, 32, is the only likely starter whose birth year begins with a “19” — and he’s rumored to be a trade candidate.
So Sörensen’s job will be as much about the ABCs of the position as the X’s and O’s.
“I know most of them,” he said, alluding to his time in Rockford. “I know their game, know their strengths and weaknesses, things they have to work on.
“There’s a lot of potential in this group. I really like the group that Kyle and management have drafted and put on the ice here, so I really have a lot of belief in this group. So for me, it’s just a matter of getting the best out of them every day and keep their development path going.”
Mike Vellucci, power play
Details, details, details.
If the 58-year-old Farmington, Mich., native mentioned that word once, he must’ve uttered it 30 times during his talk with the Tribune.
Through the NAHL (Detroit Compuware Ambassadors), OHL (Plymouth Whalers) and AHL (Charlotte Checkers) — with a trophy at each stop — “we just consistently had details, we consistently built our game over the whole season,” Vellucci said.
“One of the proudest things people would say is that our teams got better as the season went on, and that to me is development,” he said.
Vellucci will shepherd the Hawks power play, but you could probably add director of details to his job title, especially in practice.
“It’s all the details we’re trying to do out of the drill: So we want the outside stick, we want to make sure that you’re finishing your route,” he gave as an example. “Having details of that go a long way, and all the elite players have it.”
It’s a skill he learned while working as an assistant for five seasons under Pittsburgh Penguins coach Mike Sullivan.
“We think alike, as far as having details of being organized,” Vellucci said. “One of the biggest things is how he manages the star players, seeing his interaction with Sidney Crosby, Evgeni Malkin, Kris Letang, Erik Karlsson, just seeing his day-to-day meetings and how he deals with the star player.
“Going to Pittsburgh to be able to talk with Sidney Crosby and help him with the details of his games, or areas that he needs to improve, holding him accountable, that’s what I think was the biggest lesson out of Pittsburgh.”
Elite players such as Crosby, who happens to be Connor Bedard’s idol, can put up plenty of points, “but play away from the puck has to have more detail,” Vellucci said. “So it’s just getting them to understand that and showing them and working with them, and holding them accountable
“All the star players I’ve worked with, Sidney Crosby, he wants to tell him the truth, because he wants to get better and he wants to be the best in the world. And that’s how he became the best in the world is (by) having that desire to get better.
“Getting the buy-in and not being afraid to have those hard conversations is the biggest thing.”
In Pittsburgh, Vellucci worked with the forwards and penalty kill. With the U.S. team this summer, he helped coach Hawks players Frank Nazar and Vlasic and others to the Americans’ first World Championship gold medal since 1933. He helmed the forwards and power play.
In Chicago, Vellucci inherits a Hawks power play that ranked seventh (24.9%) in success rate.
Vellucci said he mostly helmed power plays when he was a junior and minor-league coach. The Hawks ranked 30th last season in power-play opportunities (189) and last in power-play shots (228).
“There’s definitely ways you can get more man advantages by playing faster, being competitive, getting to the blue paint in the offensive zone and making them haul you down by playing a fast game and getting to those dirty areas,” Vellucci said. “Having the puck more is another way.”
Vellucci said he did a preliminary analysis of the Hawks power play, including areas on the ice where they scored goals and under what circumstances.
“There’s definitely areas to improve,” he said. “We only had one goal off the rush, as far as my calculation. … There’s opportunities to score more off the rush. A team like Boston had 15 goals off the rush.”
He’s optimistic he can squeeze more out of the Hawks.
“They’re very talented, the unit of five (Hawks) that I watched from last year, and do a lot of really good things, and I think that there’s other areas to improve on,” Vellucci said.