On the Red Wings, Cowboys, and respecting the power of the outside voice
Some random thoughts, plus somehow this all connects to Larry Bird.
Somehow, if this works, I’m going to connect the Detroit Red Wings recent surge, the Dallas Cowboys head coaching vacancy, and Larry Bird into this piece.
These things wouldn’t collide anywhere else, I think, but this site is a weird publication that reflects where my brain wanders off too, often when walking home from dropping the kid off at school.
So, the Red Wings have won seven straight games, it’s currently the longest win streak in the league and the franchise has been re-invigorated by the coaching change — dumping Derek Lalonde for Todd McLellan on Boxing Day.
The Red Wings, schematically, don’t look too different. The penalty kill has changed formations and there has been more of a shoot-first approach, but at the core the Red Wings are still very much the same team from a tactical spot.
They just happen to be a more fiery one and energized one, one that responded well to McLellan telling them to “play fucking hockey,” and happened to have a solid launching pad for a coaching change with a softer schedule coming out of the holiday break — it’s one thing to crank Chicago and Seattle at home, let’s see what happens with a trip to Florida and Dallas later this week.
McLellan has even admitted this, the schematic and long-term build will take time, he’s tweaking on the fly, but he’s still very much operating on the admittedly-flawed foundation that Lalonde left him.
But McLellan is still an outside voice, a new booming megaphone that gets players attention. Lalonde wasn’t really that fiery, and he’d reached the end of his natural coaching timeline without a playoff appearance.
A week ago I finished a tremendous book co-written by Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, and Jackie MacMullan called the When the Game Was Ours1. In the book, there’s a fascinating passage about Bird’s coaching career with the Indian Pacers, where he was one of the NBA’s best coaches for three years, and then just stepped away after a trip to the NBA Finals.
Here is the passage from the book:
Bird, even with success, planned on stepping away before he was tuned out. I’m not sure if Lalonde was tuned out by players or phased out by Red Wings management, but either way it became evident an outside voice was vital.
So McLellan entered as a disruptor, with Trent Yawney by his side, and all of the Red Wings, aside from Christian Fischer, have seemed to benefit from a chance to make a new first impression on their boss.
I spoke to Seattle Kraken coach Dan Bylsma about this on Sunday before his team fell to McLellan’s Red Wings. Bylsma, you may remember, was a mid-season hire by the Pittsburgh Penguins in 2009 and won the Stanley Cup.
“I think you know when you’re a new voice, a totally new voice, I think you get the players attention right off the hop,” Bylsma said. “(McLellan) has had a lot of success in this league … you that presence that Todd has as a coach, and the winning he’s done in the past, when he carries that into the room the players have to take notice.”
What the Bylsma is describing, and what McLellan has brought to the Red Wings, is something the Dallas Cowboys desperately need.
Now, before writing this piece myself I was editing for my pal Bob Sturm, who does a fantastic job with about anything he writes on. And on Monday, the Cowboys and Mike McCarthy officially parted ways — a contract expired, it wasn’t a firing — and this portion of Bob’s piece stood out to me.
So, they don’t want to pay premiums, and they don’t want to hire another outsider. They want a family hire, which is why we should at least consider guys on the current staff, like Al Harris and Brian Schottenheimer, as possibilities that aren’t out of the question.
Somewhere my dad, who is a diehard Cowboys fan dating back to the Roger Staubach era, is groaning reading that.
The Cowboys don’t want the outside voice because of the power dynamic, outside voices threaten Jerry Jones role as chief of everything. The Cowboys, as Bob has written about, don’t win because the owner has decided he is vital to the story.
This is quite the contrast to other NFL owners, including Magic Johnson, who have decided business acumen and ego don’t necessarily convert to on-field expertise.
And for a little bit, while Lalonde was the coach, I would often privately compare Red Wings general manager Steve Yzerman to Jones.
Now Yzerman doesn’t own the Red Wings, but based on reputation and messaging he’s effectively an owner. The Red Wings aren’t in a rebuild, they are in the midst of an “Yzerplan2” and much of the culture of the franchise is now built on how No. 19 will save them.
Yzerman creates a bit of fear, Red Wings hockey operations staffers aren’t available to the media like other organizations because of the “one voice, one message” belief, but it goes a bit further where scouts and execs you run into at a rink seemingly check their shoulder to see if Yzerman is nearby.
It’s how Yzerman operates, he does things his way, and he doesn’t often feel inclined to explain to anyone how or why he does that. That’s the way Yzerman is similar to Jones, they both define their franchise and have full autonomy with no reasonable mechanism for anyone else to ever oust them3.
But when it came to hiring McLellan, Yzerman differed from Jones and embraced more of an outside voice. McLellan has a history and is willing to push back on his GM, he’s willing to be abrasive and wants control, and after the very passive demeanor from Lalonde — which failed — Yzerman allowed for another fiery, semi-powerful voice in the room that could actually push back on him.
How well the McLellan-Yzerman dynamic evolves will be fascinating, but for now the Red Wings have at least embraced the power of an outside voice, and for the time being they are actually respecting that outside opinion.
It’s why the Red Wings are all of a sudden intriguing in the Eastern Conference playoff race and the Cowboys, seemingly for perpetuity, will never be anything more than a sideshow.
Not sure if any of this makes sense, but that’s how this site works. Thanks for reading!
I really like reading about basketball, I’m currently reading another basketball book Pacific Rims. Reading about basketball, a sport I don’t follow closely, is one of my ways of educating myself and reading for pleasure on a sport I don’t know all of the history on.
In Yzerman’s defense, this is a term he has said he dislikes.
Well technically, Yzerman could be fired while Jerry can’t be.
That the egos of someone who’s skills, luck, or timing, has lead them be extremely successful in one specific field, lead them to believe they therefore have the transferable skills to be “experts” in another field (being an offensive lineman in college in the 50s doesn’t count- so were literally a thousand others), this always amazes me.
It shows a complete lack of self awareness, of their limitations, and of the complexities of the new challenge. Jimmy Johnson knew what he was doing. Jones? Still hasn’t learned the lesson.
Webster’s definition is “Jerry Jones”.
Jim Leyland said once that perhaps the most important thing he did as a manager was help keep players' mental on track: protect them from negative media and keep them ready to play day to day. Maybe McLellan is just better at that than was Lalonde