Fire on the Ice

Last spring, the morning after the Detroit Red Wings—the team he was assistant coaching—won the highly coveted Stanley Cup, Todd McLellan called San Jose Sharks Executive Vice President and General Manager Doug Wilson to set up an interview for the head coach’s position. It was 6 a.m., and McLellan was running on only an hour of sleep after celebrating the Red Wings’ victory into the wee hours of the morning. Opportunity had struck, and he wasn’t going to waste a minute in advancing his career to the next level.

“It’s human nature for people to stay within their comfort zone,” he says of himself and the players he coaches. “I believe that the exceptional professional finds a way to elevate his way outside those limits.” That’s just the attitude that Wilson admired and thought the Sharks needed. “One of the qualities Doug Wilson was looking for was someone who had won championships,” McLellan says. One week later, McLellan took the job, and, with it, the hopes of the team’s management, players, and fans alike that he would lead the Sharks to Stanley Cup victory after three disappointing consecutive second-round playoff exits. “We have to find ways for individuals to take it up a notch,” he said, as the team went into training camp last September. “All it takes is a 2 percent change, just small enough to get over the hump. What fans, coaches, and even players don’t understand is how hard it is to win. The Stanley Cup is a great thing. It’s what we all strive for, but it’s very, very hard to win.”

At age 41, McLellan is the youngest head coach in the National Hockey League (NHL), and this is his first NHL head coaching post. But he brings an eagerness to use what he learned during Detroit’s road to the Stanley Cup, as well as his years of experience playing—including taking the ice five times with the NHL’s New York Islanders—and head coaching in the minors. His passion for hockey goes back to when he was a youth growing up in the hockey hotbed of Saskatchewan, Canada. “We were a typical Canadian hockey family,” McLellan says. “My dad brought us to the rink each winter, and we played for hours on it.”

McLellan was born in Melville, Saskatchewan, a town of roughly 4,600 people, to Bill and Bonnie McLellan on October 3, 1967. His father’s job as an officer with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police meant that the family moved from place to place. When McLellan was 5 years old, they relocated to the tiny lake resort town of Goodsoil, Saskatchewan. At barely more than 200 residents, the town had only one ice rink, and his father possessed the keys to the building. Before and after school, McLellan and his brother and sister, who are twins and only 10 months younger than him, went to skate at the rink. He also played on a hockey team, but Goodsoil was so tiny that he took the ice with players often two to three years his senior. “It was a chance to play with older boys and fit in,” he says. “That was a positive development. It made me confident.”

In addition to hockey, McLellan enjoyed playing baseball and a variety of other sports, and he knew that when he grew up he wanted to pursue a sports-related profession. “Baseball was a really big sport in our family,” says McLellan, who played second and third base. “As a family, all our spare time was spent on sports—any sport, you name it. It went with the seasons.”

After two years, the tight-knit family left Goodsoil for Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. With a population of 200,000, McLellan says it was like “moving to the big city.” He and his family made friends quickly, and it became the place he still calls home. “The leadership provided by my mom and dad and we [siblings] being so close in age brought us all together,” McLellan says, “and being a policing family, [we kids] stayed out of trouble.”

During high school, McLellan balanced his studies and a part-time job working for a construction company—that belonged to the man who owned his junior hockey team—with athletics. He skated with the Western Hockey League’s (WHL) Saskatoon Blades from 1983 to 1987, collecting a total of179 points in four seasons. When he was 18, McLellan was drafted in the fifth round of the 1986 NHL Entry Draft by the New York Islanders. “I felt a sense of excitement and relief,” he says. “During the draft year, I had shoulder surgery and played in 27 of the team’s games, and I didn’t know how that would affect my chances.”

McLellan made his debut with the Islanders in the 1987-1988 season. “I felt a sense of accomplishment and nervous excitement,” he says of when he first took the ice. “I remember being confident yet needing to answer questions for myself, whether I would fit in. I felt like I fit in as a role player at the bottom end of the roster.”

But he also sensed his vulnerability, with new players constantly moving up the ranks, prepared to take his place. McLellan played five games with the Islanders—collecting two points—and two seasons with their farm team, the Springfield Indians in the American Hockey League (AHL), before succumbing to injury. “I got to camp, and a group of doctors told me if they had to repair my shoulder again, there wasn’t much they could do,” he says. “I decided health won out over hockey.”

At age 21 and after three reconstructive surgeries on his right shoulder, McLellan ended his pro-hockey career and moved back to Saskatoon to attend the University of Saskatchewan. The desire to return to the ice grew too strong, and he left college a year later to play in the Dutch Elite League in Utrecht, Holland. “During that year, a Dutch coach was fired halfway through, and the new coach moved in with me,” McLellan says. “He gave me coaching responsibilities. That’s when coaching became a passion for me.”

McLellan served as a player-coach for the Utrecht team from 1991 to 1992. He returned to Canada with his new wife, Debbie, also of Saskatchewan, when he decided to give coaching a real try. “I applied for a coaching job in Junior A and was lucky enough to get it,” he says. He was the new coach of the North Battleford North Stars in the Saskatchewan Junior League. “I was 24 years old. I’m not sure I’d give a 24-year-old the job.”

Two years later, the Swift Current Broncos gave him a chance to be a coach in the WHL at age 26. The Broncos qualified for post-season play in each of his four years at the helm, and McLellan was named WHL Coach of the Year in 2000. Along with his head coaching duties, he held the position of general manager and was awarded WHL Executive of the Year in 1996-1997.

It was during these years that McLellan heard of Patrick Marleau, the captain of the San Jose Sharks, also of Saskatchewan. “He was an elite player throughout minor hockey,” he says. “Anybody who was involved in junior hockey knew who Patrick Marleau was.” Opportunity struck once again, when Doug Risebrough, general manager of the Minnesota Wild, gave McLellan the opportunity to coach their farm team, the Cleveland Lumberjacks, in the Independent Hockey League (IHL). “Doug Risebrough and the Wild took a chance on a young coach of the Western Hockey League,” he says. “They passed along a lot of, not necessarily coaching systems, but coaching thoughts. The mentoring that Doug in particular gave me was second to none.“

Despite troubled ownership, poor game attendance, and a lack of resources, McLellan led the Lumberjacks to the playoffs and a fourth-place finish in the Eastern Conference. “Players didn’t have equipment or sticks—or at least the sticks they wanted,” he said during an interview with CNN Sports Illustrated at the time. Afterward, the troubled league folded, and the Minnesota Wild shifted their affiliation to the Houston Aeros in the AHL and retained McLellan as head coach.

In only his second season with the Aeros, McLellan led his team to the 2003 Calder Cup title. “Winning the Calder Cup—that was the ultimate highlight,” he says. “But for me, it was also the players who have gone on to be very good NHL players. It was the development process that was the most rewarding.” Likewise, McLellan moved up to the NHL when he joined the Detroit Red Wings as an assistant coach in 2005. “Detroit was the best,” he says. “I tell people I went to Harvard. They had Hall of Fame players scattered through their dressing room on a daily basis.”

McLellan handled the forwards and the power play and was also responsible during games for telling coach Mike Babcock which players were performing up to par and which ones weren’t. Under his guidance, the Red Wings’ power-play unit finished fi rst in the NHL in 2005-2006 and third in 2007-2008. But he doesn’t take all the credit. “A lot of these things are done as a staff,” he says. “That’s the way it’ll be here.”

McLellan took over as head coach of the San Jose Sharks last September, replacing coach Ron Wilson, who was let go after being unable to take the team past the second round of the playoffs and into the Stanley Cup fi nals. McLellan is optimistic that the trophy is within the Sharks’ reach. “The team had a 49-win season last year,” he says. “It’s trying to close the gap on the best team, whereas others are trying to make the playoffs.”

In the 2007-2008 season, the Sharks racked up a franchise-record 108 points, fi nishing second behind only Detroit. On the team’s roster are players such as Jonathan Cheechoo, who won the Maurice “Rocket” Richard Trophy for the most goals scored in a season; Evgeni Nabokov, who won the Vezina Trophy awarded to the goalie judged to be the most valuable to his team; and Joe Thornton, who received the Hart Memorial Trophy as the NHL’s most valuable player. “I see talent,” McLellan says. “I see opportunity for success. In Detroit, we had trouble getting by the first round the first year, and the second or third the following year. We expected some roadblocks. I see the same in the Sharks. Having gone through the failures in Detroit and the successes will allow me and our staff to understand the process of winning a little better.”

To get over the hump, McLellan’s game plan is to push to the net at every chance and get defensemen involved in the offense. His new acquisitions are active defensemen who also have won the Stanley Cup—defensemen Rob Blake, Dan Boyle, and Brad Lukowich. “We’ve come from different organizations that had different experiences getting to the Stanley Cup, but we can share that with the players in the locker room,” McLellan says. “There will be a time that one of us has to step up and convince the players that it’s worth it.”

For McLellan, the highlight of winning the Stanley Cup was seeing the excitement in the eyes of his sons—Tyson, 12, and Cale, 9—and his father, who came onto the ice to celebrate. But the rush of winning didn’t come without his own amount of sacrifice over the years.

Last September, McLellan uprooted his wife Debbie—“a hockey mom, as good as there is,” he says—and two sons from a home that they loved in Northville, Michigan, to settle in San Jose’s Willow Glen neighborhood. Their fi rst few days in California were spent on day trips to San Francisco, Half Moon Bay, Pebble Beach, and Santa Cruz. “We’ll pick days and go out on adventures,” he says.

He hopes this will be the last in a series of moves. “From a family perspective, we’ve moved enough,” he says. “It’s a hard thing to uproot on a three-year basis. I understand the world that I’m in, and that moving often is a part of it. I want to be here long term and have it be a great experience for myself, my family, and the fans.”

So far, McLellan is enjoying life in this unlikely hockey community—with its 300 days of sunshine year-round, mild temperatures, and surprisingly devout hockey fans. Even before moving to San Jose, he had heard the noise made by San Jose’s crowds from the opposing team’s bench. “The people of San Jose and the Valley are awfully passionate about their Sharks.”