Brutal truce for Jonathan Drouin, Tampa Bay Lightning coach

Tampa Bay Lightning forward Jonathan Drouin will start the 2016-17 season playing with Steven Stamkos. Which is a pretty dramatic shift from a year ago, when the third overall pick in the 2013 NHL Draft felt marginalized and untrusted by his coach, which manifested in an early-season trade demand from his agent.

How this relationship was ultimately repaired has been a bit of a mystery. We know that GM Steve Yzerman steadfastly refused to deal him, especially with Stamkos’s fate with the team unknown as a free agent. We know that Drouin saw his ice time jump by seven minutes in the 2016 playoffs – after the cautious, limited role he was given by coach Jon Cooper in their 2015 championship run – and the results were stellar, to the tune of 14 points in 17 games. And now we know he has a key spot in the Lightning top six.

But according to a terrific column by Joe Smith of the Tampa Bay Times, the big moment for Drouin and Cooper was a brutally honest airing of grievances at a Montreal hotel restaurant over breakfast (and it wasn’t even Festivus!).

From Smith:

Drouin said that at the breakfast, he and Cooper shared their sides of the story. They also shared some blame.

“We probably said some things to each other that we’d thought about but had never said,” Cooper said. “I told him this was my thought: ‘This is what I believed when I was doing things, but now, listening to you, maybe there were some things I shouldn’t have done. Now that I look back, maybe I was wrong.’ And vice versa.

“This is what I was thinking: ‘This is what I wanted out of you, this is what I got, and you made this decision.’ And maybe he sits there and goes, ‘Maybe I shouldn’t have done that.’ But when you get to the bottom bones of it, (I was) just trying to make Jo Drouin the best he could be.”

NHL coaches can usually be split into two categories: You have the professorial types, like that high-school history teacher who also coached varsity basketball; and you have the jocks, the guys who used to roam your high-school hallways in sweatpants with a whistle around their necks.

(And then you have a guy like Mike Babcock, who’s a freaky combination of both.)

Cooper’s one of the more cerebral coaches in the NHL, sometimes to his detriment. The treatment of Drouin might have been one of those cases, but there’s no question that breaking him to the point of a trade demand led Drouin to some serious self-evaluation. After his two months on the sidelines, Drouin came back shooting more and going to the dirty spots on the ice.

But where Cooper had to a swallow his pride was in ending the tough love for Drouin, and clearing the air. As Smith wrote:

“After Drouin and Cooper regrouped, it seemed as though the forward didn’t worry that if he made a mistake in a game, he would be dropped down a few lines or lose playing time.”

Confidence is a tricky thing for a young NHL player. Sometimes it’s part of their DNA. Sometimes it comes from winning, or a hot streak. And sometimes it’s the safety net a coach or franchise provides as the player figures this wacky league out.

The correlation between Drouin’s playoff performance and the slate-cleaning with Cooper fits the latter category

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Greg Wyshynski is a writer for Yahoo Sports. Contact him at puckdaddyblog@yahoo.com or find him on Twitter. His book, TAKE YOUR EYE OFF THE PUCK, is available on Amazon and wherever books are sold.

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