What Is Lightning Coach Jon Cooper’s ‘Special Sauce?’

Pat Maroon, who is in his second season with the Lightning, first played for Cooper as a 17-year-old during the Bandits’ 2005-06 season. He blossomed from a self-described overweight and slow child into the N.A.H.L.’s most valuable player in his second season under Cooper.

“He had all 24 guys play for him every single night,” Maroon told an Edmonton newspaper in 2016. He’s one of the reasons I am where I am now.”

A key to Cooper’s success, Chase said, is that he doesn’t stop learning.

Chase recalled riding in a car once with Cooper and thinking that the coach’s musical selection was strange. Cooper told him it was what his team, then mostly teenagers, was listening to in the locker room. “If you’re not,” Chase recalled Cooper saying, “you can’t figure them out.”

McCadden, now the associate head coach at Lawrence University in Wisconsin, said that Cooper knew how to manage people well and that his composure reassured players.

“So many coaches lose their mind over an offsides call in the first period, but Coop was so good in whatever situation we were in,” McCadden said.

After three seasons with the Lightning’s A.H.L. affiliate, Cooper’s unusual career arc reached hockey’s highest rung with 16 games left in the 2012-13 season.

Cooper had immediate credibility with the Lightning, as 10 of their players had been with him in the minors in Norfolk, Va., and Syracuse, N.Y. He ultimately earned credibility with veterans, too, including Steven Stamkos, who has been with Tampa Bay since 2008 and has been its captain since 2014.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/30/sports/hockey/what-is-jon-coopers-special-sauce.html